[Disclosure: AgFunderNews’ parent company AgFunder is an investor in Resurrect Bio]
UK-based Resurrect Bio—a startup equipping crops with genetic defenses against disease—has announced the final close of its Series A round at $10.3 million. This follows the $8.1 million initial close announced in February.
The investment was led by Corteva through its Corteva Catalyst platform, with participation from Calculus Capital, Pymwymic, Future Planet Capital (UKI2S), SynBioVen, and AgFunder, taking its cumulative funding to $12.4 million.
The funds will be spent on growing the team and developing disease resistance traits in economically important crops.
Restoring plants’ natural defenses
Spun out of The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, UK in Dec 2021, Resurrect Bio has a platform to restore or resurrect crops’ natural immune systems, which have been weakened or suppressed as pathogens evolved.
Immune receptors in plants (NLR proteins) help create resistance to pathogens. In turn, pathogens secrete proteins that bind with NLR proteins in a plant, suppressing its immune response.
By identifying the proteins in pathogens that bind with NLR proteins in crops, Resurrect Bio can pinpoint precisely where partners at seed companies can make gene edits in the plant to prevent the binding process, effectively locking pathogens out and allowing plants to defend themselves again. This enables plants to fight off threats (fungal disease, oomycetes, and nematodes) without the need for chemical crop inputs.
The firm’s core tech is its FloraFold AI platform, which predicts and validates protein–protein interactions between crops and pathogens, coupled with high-throughput screening. It then recommends specific edits for partners such as seed companies to make.
Discovering the pathogen–plant interaction… and breaking it
While many plant breeding approaches focus narrowly on specific crops and traits, Resurrect Bio has developed a more foundational technology that can enable plants to counter multiple threats at once. It can also be applied to multiple plants, head of operations Robert Lo Bue told AgFunderNews in a recent interview.
“What makes Resurrect Bio unusual is that we can work with any crop, most pathogens, and many pests. The base science is about rapidly discovering the interaction between pathogen and plant and then breaking it, which sets us apart from the competition.
“The magic of it is that some of those changes are as little as [introducing just] one amino acid [change at the binding site of the helper protein]. So as little as one small change will break that interaction and make the plant resistant to the pathogen again.”
The complexity comes from the fact that plants have multiple NLR helpers and sensors, while pathogens and pests in turn may have hundreds of effector proteins, which means thousands of possible molecular interactions, he says. “So it is a process of discovering how they interact; what is unknown is which one actually interacts with the other. That’s our job, essentially.”
Joint development agreement with Corteva
In the early days, Resurrect Bio demonstrated how its tech could confer resistance to potato cyst nematode but has since worked on multiple crops, recently striking a joint development agreement with Corteva to develop disease-resistance in corn, said cofounder and CEO Cian Duggan, PhD.
“The strength of this raise reflects growing conviction in what we’re building: a scalable, AI-driven platform for resurrecting disease resistance in the world’s most important crops.”
Resurrect Bio is now seeking to engage seed companies and breeders through additional joint development agreements.
Agtech investing in 2026
Agtech startups, said Duggan, “can’t just do institutional investment… there are really three [additional] ways to make it work: corporate venture capital (CVC), philanthropy, or large government grants.”
He added: “I think there is a change in perspective where people are seeing CVC investment as a net benefit, whereas previously some people in early-stage investment would have seen it as a net negative.
“I think the perspective was that you are a pipeline company for that company, and that you somehow aren’t going to get investment from anyone else or get deals with anyone else. I think that’s just not true, at least in agtech.
“CVCs can in theory, also be more patient, and they can also make other institutional investors feel that it’s lower risk to come on board. They feel like, okay, maybe the route to market might take time, but at least either the company will be bought within a funding cycle for VC or we can sell our shares on to someone else, because this company is clearly going places.”
How the ‘resurrection’ tech works
Resurrect Bio’s patented tech – developed by Prof. Sophien Kamoun and his lab, Prof. Tolga Bozkurt, and Cian Duggan, PhD—has three pillars:
👉 FloraFold proprietary protein-protein AI prediction tool – This has been trained on plant <> pathogen interactions to better predict which proteins in pathogens might bind with which helper proteins in crops.
👉 Rapid screening – The firm’s high throughput, proprietary in-silico [computer simulated] and in-planta [in living plants] platforms screen top candidates identified by FloraFold, says Lo Bue. “We are physically interacting the effector protein from the pathogen with the NLR protein from the plant and seeing how they interact. And we can do that very rapidly at scale.”
👉 Resurrection tech – “Once we have found the interaction,” says Lo Bue, “we identify how you could make small changes in the plant [to prevent the proteins binding].”
Rather than making the edits itself, Resurrect Bio can then give partners—who have the gene editing tools, but not necessarily the targets—precise instructions as to where and how to make the edits needed to “resurrect” plants’ innate immune response, says Lo Bue.
“We essentially make the template for the seed company to implement into their own unique germplasms. Our goal is to find the interaction [and identify how to] break the interaction, but the actual gene editing with technologies such as CRISPR, are not done by us.”
Further reading:
🎥 Digital twins: Heritable Ag combines AI, genomics and environmental data to slash R&D timelines
🎥 Ag’s new toolkit: AI, genomics, and robotics converge at World Agri-Tech
Tropic bags $105m to scale gene-edited bananas, deploy TR4 resistant bananas in 2027
Amatera raises $7m to accelerate climate smart crop development by tackling screening bottleneck
