Agrobiomics' EIC Accelerator Doses Crops by the Milligram

Salinity and drought cost about €90 billion of crops a year, and salinity alone affects more than 800 million hectares of arable land. Biostimulants that help plants tolerate that stress exist, but as the CORDIS summary of Agrobiomics' EIC project puts it, they usually need large doses, which makes them costly and hard to fit into farming practice. Agrobiomics, founded in Copenhagen in 2022, uses a signalling compound that soil microorganisms produce naturally, made by bacterial fermentation and applied at one to ten milligrams a hectare, less than a teaspoon.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, SUBTARC, at its March 2025 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,499,875 from October 2025 to September 2027 to scale up production, demonstrate efficacy in large field trials for regulatory approval, and win over farmers and large agricultural biology companies.

A result that only appears under stress

The company's reported effect is unusually specific and, for that reason, more credible than most: a 20% yield increase in stressed conditions, and no increase when plants are not stressed. Treated plants are reported to grow faster and larger with more chlorophyll. That pattern is what a stress-tolerance product should look like, and it also defines the market: the product is worth paying for in dry or saline fields and worth nothing in good ones.

The evidence base is greenhouse validation on tomatoes and soybeans plus field trials on tomatoes in Spain and soybeans in North America, and the company has been explicit that more field data is needed. R&D director Mathilde Nordgaard put the commercial problem plainly to AgFunderNews: "Big [agribusiness] companies want to see lots of big demonstrations."

The trials the grant pays for

That is exactly what the EIC project funds: large field trials across regions and soil types, generating the data needed for regulatory approval in Europe and for the large agricultural biology companies that would distribute the product. The plan is to roll out for soybean and tomato first and then extend to cereals, fruits and vegetables, and a separate Danish GUDP project called BIORESCUE, worth about €1.5 million and running to 2029, is validating the compound for drought tolerance in cereals with the University of Copenhagen, Agrolab and SEGES Innovation.

No trial result has been published since the grant started, and CORDIS shows no periodic report. Biostimulant regulation in the EU, under the fertilising products regulation, also requires efficacy evidence for the claims a product makes, which is part of what these trials are for.

1. Effect at very low dosesReported1 to 10 milligrams a hectare, per the BioInnovation Institute.
2. Field trials in two cropsDoneTomatoes in Spain, soybeans in North America.
3. Large trials for regulatory approvalFundedThe central deliverable of the EIC grant.
4. Agribusiness distributionNone announcedThe company's stated route to market.

Four sources, one product

Agrobiomics started with about $2 million of convertible notes from the BioInnovation Institute in 2022 and 2023, raised €4 million from NOON Ventures in July 2024 as its first venture round, won about €1.5 million from Denmark's green development programme in January 2025, and then the EIC grant. Trade coverage in July 2025 described the EIC award as up to €7.5 million including equity; CORDIS records the €2.5 million grant and no EIC Fund investment has been announced.

Southern Europe is the test case

Salinity is rising in southern European irrigated agriculture as groundwater is over-drawn and seawater intrudes, and drought years are now routine in Spain, Italy and Greece. A product that costs almost nothing per hectare and only pays off in stressed fields fits that geography precisely, which is why the project's climate action tracker is at 100% and why its first field trials were on Spanish tomatoes. The same argument applies with more force outside Europe, which the company names as a target.