Computomics GmbH has raised €6.3 million in new equity in a Series B financing round led by Convent Capital Agri Food Fund, which invested €5 million, as the German agricultural technology company prepares to scale commercial delivery of its climate-smart crop breeding platform.
Existing investors, including High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), MBG Baden-Württemberg and Amathaon Capital, also participated in the round, alongside Computomics’ founders and scientific advisers.
The new capital will be used to expand the commercial delivery of Computomics’ technology, which uses machine learning to help crop breeders predict how different plant genotypes are likely to perform under specific environmental conditions.
The company’s technology combines genomic information with environmental variables, including temperature, rainfall and soil conditions, as well as field measurements. The objective is to give breeders greater insight into how candidate varieties could perform under increasingly variable growing conditions before those varieties go through years of conventional field testing.
The financing arrives as European agriculture faces mounting pressure from heat and drought. The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre has revised down its 2026 yield forecasts for spring and summer crops, with particularly significant reductions for maize and sunflower.
France is also heading towards one of its weakest maize harvests in decades, highlighting the growing challenge for breeders seeking to develop varieties capable of maintaining performance under harsher environmental conditions.
For Computomics, the changing climate is accelerating the need to modernise how crop varieties are selected. “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,” said Dr. Sebastian J. Schultheiss, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Computomics.
“This financing is about getting that capability into far more breeding programs, faster,” Schultheiss added.
Using AI to predict crop performance
Computomics has developed machine learning models designed to predict the interaction between a plant’s genetics and its growing environment. Traditional breeding programmes can require extensive field trials across multiple locations and seasons to determine whether a candidate variety is sufficiently resilient and stable.
Computomics aims to complement that process by allowing breeders to analyse genetic and environmental information computationally and identify promising candidates earlier. The company’s ×SeedScore platform runs these predictions at the scale of commercial breeding programmes.
The technology can help breeders assess questions such as which candidates are likely to maintain performance under hotter and drier conditions, which varieties demonstrate consistent performance across multiple environments and where a particular variety may be best suited for cultivation. The approach is designed to help breeders move beyond simply identifying the highest-performing candidate in a single environment and instead understand how genetics interact with different environmental conditions.
Computomics works with commercial breeders across field crops, forages, vegetables and specialty crops.
Climate pressure raises urgency for breeders
The Series B financing comes against a backdrop of increasing climate volatility across European agriculture. Higher temperatures, changing rainfall patterns and more frequent periods of drought are complicating the development of crop varieties that can perform consistently across different growing environments.
The challenge is compounded by the time required to bring new varieties to market. Crop varieties currently entering commercial production were often developed using breeding programmes and environmental assumptions that reflect a different climate from the one farmers are increasingly experiencing.
Computomics believes predictive breeding can help shorten the feedback loop between genetic selection and real-world performance. By incorporating environmental data into breeding decisions, the company aims to help breeders identify varieties with resilience traits before they are fully validated through multiple seasons of field trials.
Convent Capital leads Series B
Convent Capital Agri Food Fund led the financing with a €5 million investment, signalling investor confidence in the intersection of agricultural technology, artificial intelligence and climate resilience. Stephen McLoughlin, Partner at Convent Capital Agri Food Fund, said the company’s commercial model is closely linked to its potential environmental impact.
“We back companies whose environmental impact grows with their commercial success,” McLoughlin said. “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,” he added. The participation of Computomics’ existing investors provides continuity as the company moves from technology development towards broader commercial deployment.
Existing investors back next stage of growth
High-Tech Gründerfonds, MBG Baden-Württemberg and Amathaon Capital participated in the Series B, alongside founders and scientific advisers.
HTGF has backed Computomics since its seed stage and views AI-enabled breeding as an important technology for adapting agriculture to climate change. “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,” said Dr. Frank Hensel, Principal at High-Tech Gründerfonds.
“HTGF has supported Computomics since the seed phase and congratulates the team on this growth financing,” Hensel added. The latest investment provides Computomics with additional capital to expand the reach of its technology among commercial breeding organisations and strengthen the company’s ability to translate complex genetic and environmental datasets into practical breeding decisions.
From climate-smart breeding to commercial scale
The Series B marks another step in Computomics’ effort to make data-driven breeding a more integral part of commercial crop development. The company is targeting a fundamental challenge for agriculture: developing crops that can maintain productivity as the environmental conditions under which they are grown become less predictable.
Rather than replacing conventional field trials, Computomics’ platform is designed to give breeders additional information earlier in the selection process, potentially allowing them to focus costly testing and development resources on the most promising candidates. The company’s technology therefore sits at the intersection of AI, genomics, agricultural data and climate adaptation.
With €6.3 million of new equity, Computomics now plans to expand commercial delivery of its platform and bring predictive breeding capabilities to more breeding programmes. The financing also benefits from support from the European Union under the InvestEU Fund, adding a European policy dimension to efforts to accelerate technologies that can strengthen agricultural resilience.
As climate pressure intensifies across European farmland, the ability to predict which crop varieties can withstand heat, drought and changing environments could become an increasingly important competitive advantage for breeders—and a critical tool for farmers seeking more reliable yields.
