For thousands of years, humans have cultivated the same handful of crops. Now, a small team in Wageningen thinks they can add a new one to the list.
Aardaia, a Dutch agricultural startup founded in 2025, has raised €5 million in seed funding to develop what it's calling the "Aardaker"—a nitrogen-fixing tuber crop that could, if the science holds, deliver the protein punch of a legume with the hearty yield of a potato. The round, announced July 8, was led by Point Nine, a Berlin-based venture firm, with backing from Astanor, Grey Silo Ventures (the corporate investment arm of Italy's Cereal Docks Group), and FoodLabs, which previously supported the company. A clutch of angel investors, including Alexander Sainty and Dominic R., also participated.
It's an audacious pitch. The last time humanity successfully domesticated a major food crop from the wild, the printing press hadn't been invented yet.
Breeding at Breakneck Speed
The crop at the center of Aardaia's ambitions is Lathyrus tuberosus, a wild perennial legume that produces edible underground tubers. In nature, it's a scraggly, uncooperative plant—hardly the stuff of agricultural revolution. But CEO Pádraic Flood, a botanist who spent years studying plant genetics at Wageningen University and later at the Max Plank Institute for Plant Breeding Research, believes his team can domesticate it in a fraction of the time it took our ancestors to tame wheat or maize.
The company's approach sidesteps genetic modification entirely. Instead, Aardaia is banking on what might be called brute-force botany: large-scale genomic sequencing, high-throughput phenotyping, and accelerated breeding cycles that shuttle plants between different climates to compress generations. What once took millennia, Flood argues, can now unfold in years.
In 2026 alone, the company plans to screen roughly 750,000 unique Aardaker genotypes. That figure is expected to swell to around 2 million by 2027. According to a LinkedIn post the company shared in July, they're already tending to "close to a million unique aardaker plants"—a figure that, frankly, staggers the imagination for a 14-person operation.
"Humans have barely created a new crop in thousands of years because it was impossibly slow," Point Nine's Christoph Janz said in coverage published alongside the funding announcement. "Aardaia compresses that into years, combining old-fashioned breeding with modern genomics and AI."
Perhaps more than Flood expected when he left his role leading crop genetics at vertical farming company INFARM around 2024.
The Protein Problem
The timing is no accident. Europe is in the midst of a quiet reckoning over where its food—and particularly its protein—comes from. An updated European Commission factsheet from early July outlines plans to boost EU-produced protein for animal feed from 25.8% to 35% by 2035, a shift driven in part by anxieties over supply chain vulnerabilities and environmental costs. A June report from the European Environment Agency underscored just how reliant the continent remains on imported soy.
Aardaia's vision, in that context, starts to make a certain kind of sense. A crop that fixes its own nitrogen (courtesy of those legume roots) and produces protein-rich tubers could theoretically slot into European farming systems without the baggage of transatlantic soy shipments.
For now, though, the company's ambitions are modest—or at least grounded. Aardaia has begun selling small quantities of its experimental tubers to high-end restaurants in the Netherlands, according to Point Nine's investor blog. The longer-term plan involves food ingredient applications and, eventually, a hybrid seed system that could be licensed to growers.
A Team Built for the Long Haul
Flood isn't working alone. His co-founder, COO Mike Henske, previously held roles at Indigo and Solynta, two companies with deep roots in agricultural innovation. The broader team—now 14 strong as of early July—spans roughly 10 nationalities, with about half holding PhDs, according to TechFundingNews. It's the kind of polyglot, credentialed group that seems purpose-built for a project this technically demanding.
The company's trajectory has been swift. Just six months ago, in February 2025, Aardaia closed a €770,000 pre-seed round led by FoodLabs and the StartLife accelerator. The new seed round represents a significant step up, though it's still early innings for a venture that requires not just scientific breakthroughs but also regulatory approvals, farmer buy-in, and consumer acceptance.
Whether Aardaia can pull it off remains an open question. Creating a new staple crop from scratch is, by any measure, an improbable endeavor—one that collides with biology, economics, and the stubborn inertia of agricultural tradition. But in an era when food systems are under mounting pressure, perhaps the improbable is worth a bet.
