Ghent’s Rainbow Crops bags €9.7 million to advance AI-powered gene editing for improved crop varieties

Rainbow Crops, a Ghent-based AgTech startup developing improved crop varieties by engineering complex agronomic traits, has raised €9.7 million in Seed funding to advance its technology platform, expand its application across multiple crops, and scale the team.

The over-subscribed funding round was led by Italian venture capital company LIFTT, together with its vehicle LIFTT EuroInvest, with participation from existing investors AIF (Agri Investment Fund), PINC, and VIB, as well as new investors Corteva, through its Corteva Catalyst investment platform, and Maia Ventures. This round follows Rainbow Crops’ recent €6 million ($7 million) grant from the Gates Foundation. 

Giacomo Bastianelli, CEO and co-founder of Rainbow Crops, said, “This investment allows us to accelerate the transition from early validation to systematic deployment of our platform. Our goal is to accelerate complex trait engineering and make it accessible to partners globally.”

“This round signals strong external validation and positions Rainbow Crops as an emerging category leader in AI-driven, multiplex genome engineering. We are now focused on innovative partnerships and on delivering real-world impact in the field.”

Founded in 2025 as a spin-off from the VIB–UGent Centre for Plant Systems Biology, Rainbow Crops develops climate-resilient, high-performing crop varieties through its proprietary Trait Foundry platform. 

According to the company, while traditional breeding has delivered major gains in the past decades, engineering complex traits remains slow, expensive, and difficult to predict. 

It further notes that as climate volatility increases, input costs fluctuate, and regulatory shifts boost the wider adoption of gene editing, crop developers are under growing pressure to deliver more predictable performance in less time.

Rainbow Crops’ proprietary Trait Foundry platform integrates artificial intelligence, multiplex genome editing, precision breeding, and automated phenotyping to systematically identify, generate, and evaluate combinations of genetic variants underlying complex agronomic traits such as yield or stress resilience.

By combining multiplex genome editing with breeding, the platform claims to create populations of plants with rationally designed genetic diversity, enabling the efficient exploration and selection of multi-gene trait architectures at scale. Proof of concept has been demonstrated in corn.

The company works with seed companies, breeding organisations, research partners, investors, and industry collaborators seeking to accelerate crop innovation through complex trait engineering.

Edoardo Bianchi, Project Manager at LIFTT, said, “Rainbow Crops is a compelling example of breakthrough innovation in agritech – a category-defining platform that integrates AI, genome editing, and real-world validation to address critical crop breeding challenges. At LIFTT, we are proud to support and invest in such a visionary project.”

With this funding, Rainbow Crops will accelerate its AI-supported multiplex genome editing capabilities, support the deployment of its platform in key crops, and strengthen the team across both scientific and technical functions to drive execution.

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