VitalFluid raises €17.2M to replace chemical crop protection with plasma-activated water

VitalFluid (Eindhoven) has raised €17.2 million (approximately $19.9 million) in a round co-led by Invest-NL and Alder Tree Investments, with participation from Horticoop, Brabantse Ontwikkelings Maatschappij (BOM), Future Food Fund, Graduate Ventures, Innovation Industries, VDL Groep, and Goeie Grutten Impact Fonds. The package includes a €2.7 million public innovation credit from RVO, the Dutch enterprise agency, alongside the private equity component. iGrow News identifies this as a Series A; EU Startups does not label the stage explicitly. A €5 million seed closed in April 2024. The company was founded in 2014 as a spinout from Eindhoven University of Technology by Paul Leenders and Polo van Ooij and produces Plasma Activated Water (PAW) for crop protection.

The technology starts with physics. When lightning strikes in humid conditions, plasma from the electrical discharge reacts with water molecules to produce a solution hostile to fungal and bacterial pathogens. VitalFluid builds devices — the "lightning in a box" framing its communications lean on — that replicate this process on demand, at farm or greenhouse scale, producing PAW without chemical inputs. The activated water is applied to crops as a fungicide and bactericide substitute; the company's data shows it controlling the same pathogens that conventional chemical sprays address, without leaving chemical residue on the produce or in the soil.

What the commercial base actually shows

VitalFluid is past pilot stage. More than 100 hectares of commercial strawberry production in the United Kingdom are already running on PAW — through partnerships with Hall Hunter Partnership, Angus Growers, and EC Drummond. These are established commercial growers paying for a service, not research agreements. The UK deployment reflects a regulatory environment where chemical approval is tightening under post-Brexit Food Standards Agency review, and where major supermarket sustainability requirements are beginning to translate into procurement pressure on chemical residues. The company's £ revenues are real before the €17.2M arrives.

Erik Hertel, CEO of VitalFluid: "This investment confirms the potential of our technology to make a fundamental contribution to a more sustainable and future-proof food system. It allows us to accelerate our commercial rollout and give more growers access to an effective alternative to chemical crop protection."

The syndicate and the strategic logic

The round's composition reads as deliberate rather than opportunistic. Invest-NL is a government-backed development finance institution whose mandate includes scaling sustainable food-system technologies. BOM is a regional economic development company covering North Brabant, where VitalFluid is headquartered. The RVO innovation credit is a national instrument specifically designed for this class of scaling technology. Together these three public-sector instruments contribute a meaningful portion of the total, reducing the dilution burden on private investors while validating the technology under criteria that pure-return VCs do not apply.

VDL Groep — one of the Netherlands' largest privately owned industrial groups — brings manufacturing and systems integration credibility for the hardware that generates PAW at scale. Horticoop, a Dutch horticultural cooperative, provides the distribution network the technology needs to reach European growers systematically. Future Food Fund and Goeie Grutten Impact Fonds anchor the impact-investment rationale.

The capital goes in three directions: deepening the UK rollout, entering the US market, and extending crop coverage from strawberries to apples and grapes — crops that carry a higher proportion of the chemical fungicide spend VitalFluid is targeting. US expansion is the riskiest vector: the regulatory environment is structurally less aligned with chemical alternatives than the EU Farm to Fork framework, and yield-impact data at US commercial scale does not yet exist.