Computomics, a Tübingen-based BioTech research company, has raised €6.3 million in a Series B round to scale commercial delivery of its climate-smart breeding platform, as heat and drought take an increasing toll on European harvests.
The round was led by Convent Capital Agri Food Fund, which invested €5 million. Existing investors High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), MBG Baden-Württemberg, and Amathaon Capital also participated, alongside founders and scientific advisors. The startup also benefits from support from the European Union under the InvestEU Fund.
“We back companies whose environmental impact grows with their commercial success. Better breeding predictions mean fewer wasted seasons and varieties that hold up in the field, so the impact case and the business case point the same way. That alignment is why we led this round,” said Stephen McLoughlin, Partner at Convent Capital Agri Food Fund.
The Series B funding comes at a time when European growers have been battered by heat and drought. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has cut its 2026 yield forecasts for all spring and summer crops, with the steepest downgrades affecting maize and sunflower, and France is on course for one of its weakest maize harvests in decades. The varieties currently in the ground were bred for a climate that has already shifted.
To overcome this challenge, Computomics, founded in 2012 as a spin-off from the Max Planck Institute for Biology and the University of Tübingen, builds machine learning models that forecast how a specific genotype will perform under a given set of environmental conditions. The models combine genomic data with environmental factors such as temperature, rainfall and soil characteristics, alongside field measurements.
The ML models offer breeders predictions to answer questions that cannot be answered by trial data alone within the available time: which candidates will hold up in hotter, drier conditions; which perform consistently across environments rather than excelling in just one; and where a given variety should be placed. The company’s ×SeedScore® platform runs these predictions at the scale of a full commercial breeding programme. Its customer base spans breeders working in field crops, forages, vegetables and specialty crops.
“Breeders have never lacked ambition about climate resilience. What they have lacked is a way to see it before the field tells them, which takes years they no longer have. This financing is about getting that capability into far more breeding programs, faster,” said Dr. Sebastian J. Schultheiss, co-founder and CEO of Computomics
Its climate-smart breeding portfolio includes ×SeedScore® alongside CropCompass and BreedScope. The company’s omics data hub, Pantograph, supports trait discovery through pangenome analysis, while MORPHEUS and MEGAN7 serve microbiome applications.
“AI-based breeding of stress-resistant crops is part of the German federal government’s High-Tech Agenda for good reason: it is one of the levers that matter most as the climate shifts. HTGF has supported Computomics since the seed phase and congratulates the team on this growth financing,” said Dr. Frank Hensel, Principal at High-Tech Gründerfonds.
The new capital will be used to scale commercial delivery of Computomics’ climate-smart breeding platform, extending the technology to more breeding programmes at a faster pace.
