Aardaia raises an oversubscribed €5 million Seed to domesticate a protein-rich wild tuber

Aardaia, a Wageningen-based crop science startup founded in 2023 by Pádraic Flood (CEO) and Mike Henske, has raised an oversubscribed €5 million Seed round led by Point Nine, with participation from Astanor, Grey Silo Ventures, and returning investor FoodLabs. The round closed six months after Aardaia's pre-seed — earlier than planned — following strong early results in the field. The team has grown to 14 people across 10 nationalities, half of them holding PhDs.

The forgotten tuber

Aardaia is trying to do something that has not happened in centuries: create a new European crop. Its chosen candidate is the aardaker (Lathyrus tuberosus), a wild tuber found from the Netherlands to central Siberia that humans have eaten for generations but never farmed at scale. In agronomic terms, it is unusually well-equipped: it fixes nitrogen in the soil like a legume, eliminating the need for synthetic fertiliser, and produces protein at a density that could exceed any existing crop at full yield.

The word "could" is load-bearing. The aardaker has never been bred for agricultural performance. Flood, who trained as a botanist at Wageningen University and was previously crop genetics lead at Infarm, co-founded the company with Henske — who worked in agribusiness at Indigo and Solynta — precisely to solve that problem using methods that have become newly tractable.

Rather than gene editing or GM, Aardaia uses large-scale genomic sequencing and phenotyping to identify the best wild genetics and select for agricultural traits. The company plans to screen 750,000 genotypes in 2026 and two million in 2027. The genomics and AI compress what would classically take decades into years.

Why a SaaS investor backed a potato

Point Nine is known for investing in software companies — Revolut, Attio, and Zendesk are in its portfolio. A plant-breeding startup in Wageningen is not an obvious fit.

Partner Christoph Janz acknowledged as much directly: "At Point Nine we invest mainly in software and AI, so a plant-breeding company wasn't an obvious fit. But after my first call with Pádraic and Mike I was hooked. Humans have barely created a new crop in thousands of years because it was impossibly slow. Aardaia compresses that into years, combining old-fashioned breeding with modern genomics and AI."

The argument that landed was scalability. Unlike vertical farming models — which require new infrastructure — the aardaker can be grown on existing European farmland with existing equipment. The compounding cost structure of software is not present, but the distribution argument is: you do not need to build the farm, only the crop.

Astanor partner Harry Briggs called Flood "a true visionary who could be the Norman Borlaug of this generation" — the agronomist associated with the Green Revolution. Grey Silo Ventures, the VC arm of Italian ingredients group Cereal Docks, brings supply-chain access: farmland relationships and industry buyers for when the crop reaches commercial scale. FoodLabs, which backed the pre-seed, adds continuity.

The round was oversubscribed. The new capital goes to expanding the breeding programme, growing the team, and reaching market readiness within two years — at which point a Series A is expected to fund commercialisation at scale. Europe's protein import dependency is the market; the question is whether Aardaia can solve the two-sided problem Flood describes plainly: "Farmers don't want to grow a crop without a market, and a market can't form until farmers grow it."