Germany's Computomics raises €6.3 million to help crop breeders cope with heat and drought
Tübingen-based biotech company Computomics has closed a €6.3 million Series B round to expand its AI-driven platform that helps breeders predict how crop varieties will perform under heat and drought. The funding arrives as European harvests suffer from worsening climate conditions.
Computomics, a biotech research company based in Tübingen, Germany, has raised €6.3 million in a Series B funding round to broaden the commercial reach of its climate-smart crop breeding platform. The round was led by Convent Capital Agri Food Fund, which contributed €5 million, with participation from existing backers High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), MBG Baden-Württemberg and Amathaon Capital, along with founders and scientific advisors. The company also receives support from the European Union through the InvestEU Fund.
Stephen McLoughlin, Partner at Convent Capital Agri Food Fund, said the fund backs companies whose environmental impact scales alongside their commercial growth, noting that more accurate breeding predictions translate into fewer failed seasons and sturdier crop varieties.
Harvests hit by extreme weather
The funding round comes as European farmers face mounting damage from heat and drought. The European Commission's Joint Research Centre has lowered its 2026 yield forecasts for spring and summer crops, with maize and sunflower seeing the sharpest cuts. France is heading toward one of its weakest maize harvests in decades.
Founded in 2012 as a spin-off from the Max Planck Institute for Biology and the University of Tübingen, Computomics builds machine learning models that predict how a given genotype will perform under specific environmental conditions, combining genomic data with factors such as temperature, rainfall and soil characteristics alongside field measurements.
The company's ×SeedScore® platform runs these predictions at the scale of a full commercial breeding programme, helping identify which varieties will hold up best in hotter, drier climates. Its customers include breeders working across field crops, forages, vegetables and specialty crops.
Co-founder and CEO Dr. Sebastian J. Schultheiss said the new capital will help bring this predictive capability to many more breeding programmes at a faster pace. Beyond ×SeedScore®, the company's portfolio includes CropCompass and BreedScope, its omics data hub Pantograph, and microbiome tools MORPHEUS and MEGAN7.
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