Gravity Gardens raises €2.6M to bring dry seed activation to field crops that wet priming never reached

Gravity Gardens (Nijmegen) has secured a €2.6 million Seed round combining equity investment and EFRO (European Regional Development Fund) funding, supported by VP Capital, Brightlands Venture Partners (BVP), and Graduate Ventures, alongside a group of private investors. The round follows earlier backing from StartLife and a Rabobank innovation loan, bringing the company's total capital raised to more than €3 million.

Founded in 2024 by Paulino Valdés (CEO) and Robin Le Vigouroux (CTO), Gravity Gardens is developing a seed activation technology that improves how crops establish in the field without adding water, chemicals, or coating to the seed. The technology was developed with support from the European Space Agency Business Incubation Centre (ESA BIC) Noordwijk. The company operates its own research, development, and production facility in Nijmegen.

The problem with conventional priming

Seed activation — improving germination conditions before a seed goes into the ground — is not a new idea. The industry has known for decades that a seed given appropriate pre-treatment emerges faster, more evenly, and holds up better under difficult seedbed conditions. The standard method is wet priming: the seed is hydrated to a controlled moisture level, held under precise environmental conditions for a set period, then dried again. Handled correctly, it reliably improves germination uniformity.

The economics of wet priming have always been constraining. The hydration, hold, and drying steps require specialised equipment, careful environmental control, and handling logistics that add cost at every stage. Those costs can be absorbed when seed values are high — premium vegetable and flower seed, where a kilogram of treated seed commands prices that justify the per-unit processing expense. For the vast majority of agricultural crops by volume — wheat, maize, oilseed rape, sugar beet — wet priming has never been economically viable. The margin is not there.

The dry alternative

Gravity Gardens' process removes water from the activation step entirely. Without a hydration stage to control and nothing to dry off afterwards, the cost structure changes substantially. The company targets vigour — not just germination rate, but how fast and how strongly a crop establishes itself after it is in the ground — which it argues is the metric that actually determines a season's outcome.

Paulino Valdés: "Every seed company in Europe has a seed lot sitting in storage that germinates at grade A quality on the bench and then disappoints in the field. Germination matters, but it is not the number that decides your season. Vigour is, and vigour is the first thing you lose as a lot ages or as the spring turns against you. Priming has been the industry's answer for forty years and it is a good answer, but it is a wet one, and the cost and complications that come with that are why it only ever made sense for a handful of high-value crops. What we have is dry, which takes those costs out. Cheap enough for field crops, and aimed at the thing that actually decides the season. That combination is what has not existed before."

The technology has undergone seven external trials, including validation experiments conducted by Vertify. The company has active programmes with Vertify, HLB, Oost NL, and Foodvalley, through which it accessed an SME Innovation Voucher.

The plan forward

The €2.6 million will fund development of industrial-scale equipment in partnership with Demcon, the Dutch engineering group, alongside larger trial programmes across new crops. Market readiness is targeted during 2027.

Erica van Eeghen, Senior Manager Ventures at VP Capital: "The most impactful innovations are often the ones that improve the foundations of a system. Seeds are exactly that foundation. Gravity Gardens has developed a technology that could make stronger crop establishment accessible to many more farmers while using fewer natural resources."

Marcel Zijp, Senior Investment Manager at Brightlands Venture Partners: "Germination is the most critical phase in plant development. Gravity Gardens' platform stimulates the plant's natural power, and its cost-competitive technology can be applied in a wide variety of crops."