Four people in a Toronto office are trying to solve one of agriculture's most stubborn contradictions: how to kill the insects destroying crops without harming the ones keeping farms alive in the first place.
Molagri—a startup in the early stages of development—has been accepted into Y Combinator's summer cohort with a pitch that sounds almost too precise to work. The startup is engineering biopesticides designed to kill pests at the molecular level while leaving honeybees and other beneficial insects untouched. Not mostly untouched. Untouched.
The timing, at least, makes sense. Honeybee colony losses have shown signs of stabilization in recent USDA data and Apiary Inspectors of America surveys, though "stabilized" is a generous term when you're talking about a diminished baseline. Meanwhile, regulators are tightening restrictions on conventional insecticides faster than the industry anticipated, and the market for safer alternatives is expanding in response—perhaps more rapidly than anyone expected.
The global biopesticides market reached $9.91 billion in 2025, according to Fortune Business Insights. By 2034, the firm projects that figure will reach $40.61 billion, representing a compound annual growth rate north of 17%. Grand View Research pegs the 2025 market size slightly lower—$8.37 billion—but sees it growing to $26.08 billion by 2033. The methodological differences between forecasters are real, but the trajectory isn't in question.
What's propelling this isn't just environmentalist sentiment or California regulatory fervor, though both play roles. It's the collision of three forces: regulatory action that's removing tools from farmers' hands, ecological stress that's making those tools riskier to use, and scientific breakthroughs that are finally making alternatives viable.
Where Things Stand Now
Biopesticides occupy an odd position in modern agriculture—widely discussed, increasingly deployed, but rarely trusted to do the job alone.
A survey conducted in early 2026 by CropLife found that 56% of top agricultural retailers reported sales growth in the biologicals category during 2025. Yet 98% of those same retailers said their grower clients use biologicals as supplements to conventional pesticides, not replacements. The integration problem persists. Storage requirements differ from synthetic chemicals, sometimes drastically. Return on investment can be inconsistent. Performance swings more wildly with temperature, humidity, and application timing.
Still, adoption accelerates—particularly in specialty crops where profit margins can absorb experimentation costs and where regulatory compliance burdens already run high. The CropLife survey identified integration challenges and ROI volatility as persistent barriers, but awareness among growers has reached near-saturation. The question has shifted from "do biologicals work?" to "where do they work economically?"
The honeybee situation provides context for why this matters. USDA data from spring 2026 showed honey-producing colonies down 7% year-over-year. The Apiary Inspectors of America survey, summarized by Auburn University that June, indicated stabilization after record losses in prior seasons—but stabilization at a troublingly lower level. Varroa mites remain the primary culprit in colony collapse, though pesticide exposure, particularly from neonicotinoids and other broad-spectrum insecticides, compounds the damage.
The Regulatory Squeeze
California's neonicotinoid regulations took effect January 1, 2024 for agricultural applications, with additional non-agricultural restrictions following in 2025 under AB 363. New York's "Birds and Bees Protection Act," signed in December 2023, phases in treated-seed restrictions through 2027. The European Union banned outdoor uses of three neonicotinoid active ingredients back in 2018, and a 2023 Court of Justice ruling further constrained emergency authorizations.
These aren't symbolic gestures. They're removing options from the grower's toolkit, creating immediate demand for alternatives that deliver efficacy without the ecological collateral damage.
The EPA has responded by tightening pollinator risk assessments, updating guidance in 2026 to quantify effects on both individual bees and colony health. The agency's Endangered Species Act workplan, finalized for insecticides this spring, adds mitigation requirements to conventional actives—potentially tilting the playing field toward lower-risk biologicals in sensitive habitats.
Technology, meanwhile, is catching up to the policy pressure.
Three distinct platforms have reached commercial scale in recent years, each exploiting a different biological mechanism to achieve selectivity. GreenLight Biosciences secured EPA registration for Calantha in January 2024—the first sprayable dsRNA insecticide approved in the United States. The product targets Colorado potato beetle by disrupting pest-specific genes through RNA interference. Application rates run around 4 grams per acre. The EPA's assessment concluded that dietary consumption poses no risk to pollinators, supported by testing showing the dsRNA breaks down rapidly in soil, water, and simulated gastric fluids.
Vestaron's peptide-based insecticides represent another approach. SPEAR, a neuromuscular disruptor, received EPA approval in 2020 and European recognition for its safety profile. The product carries a four-hour re-entry interval, zero-day pre-harvest interval, and an MRL exemption—regulatory language that translates to "safe enough to use right up until harvest." BASIN, a second peptide active ingredient, gained EPA approval in March 2024. Vestaron markets both products as compatible with integrated pest management programs, particularly in California tree nut production against navel orangeworm.
Provivi scales pheromone production for row crops, targeting pests like fall armyworm with sex attractants that disrupt mating. Pheromones are inherently selective—they don't affect non-target species by design—and Provivi's fermentation platform aims to make them cost-competitive with synthetic alternatives. Whether that's achievable at field scale remains an open question.
In September 2025, the EPA finalized registration for Vadescana, a dsRNA product targeting Varroa mites inside honey bee hives. The specificity is absolute: the RNA sequence matches a gene unique to the mite, with no sequence homology to bee genetics. It's perhaps the purest proof point yet for molecular targeting applied not just to protect pollinators but to save them.
Molagri's Bet
Into this landscape steps Molagri, founded by researchers who bring deep expertise in protein biochemistry and viral structural biology from the University of Toronto. Zaky Hassan and Min Jin published in Nature Communications and Nature Microbiology before pivoting to agricultural pests. Their LinkedIn announcement in June framed the mission around "precision pesticides" as critical to food security, with explicit focus on molecular targets unique to pest insects.
The Y Combinator profile describes their approach: identify biochemical pathways present in target pests but absent in bees and beneficial insects, then develop biobased molecules that exploit those differences. The company also emphasizes resistance modeling—anticipating evolutionary pressure and staying ahead of pest adaptation. It's a page from the pharmaceutical playbook, applied to agriculture.
The competitive set, of course, includes better-capitalized players with products already generating revenue. BASF closed its acquisition of AgBiTech on March 31, 2026, expanding its biological insect control portfolio globally. Syngenta Group reported strong biologicals performance in the first quarter of this year, citing over 300 approvals. Bayer's recent pipeline communications highlight "profile-driven" molecule discovery aligned with safety and sustainability metrics, including pollinator considerations.
Biotalys, focused on protein-based biofungicides, received EPA approval for EVOCA in December 2025, with EU review ongoing. Bee Vectoring Technologies has maintained EPA registration since 2019 for its bee-delivered biofungicide system, demonstrating the diversity of technical approaches competing for grower attention.
The major agrochemical companies are hedging their bets. They continue defending existing synthetic portfolios while building biologicals divisions through acquisition and internal development. The message from incumbents isn't replacement but integration—biologicals as part of a broader toolkit. That narrative aligns with grower behavior, at least for now. Whether it holds as regulatory pressure mounts is another question.
The Economics Problem
The market trajectory depends on solving the economics, which remain stubbornly difficult.
McKinsey surveys from 2025 indicate biologicals adoption rising in specialty crops and in certain markets like India (up 1.5 times versus 2022), but profitability concerns constrain faster growth. Retailers in the CropLife survey flagged storage, handling, and ROI consistency as ongoing hurdles. One grower in California's Central Valley put it bluntly to an industry publication: "If it doesn't pencil out, it doesn't get sprayed. Period."
Precision agriculture infrastructure may provide the integration layer biologicals need. Decision-support systems that optimize application timing and placement based on real-time pest pressure, weather, and crop stage can deploy biologicals where they perform best rather than asking them to do everything everywhere. CropLife's precision ag tracking shows continued expansion of data-driven tools on farms, creating potential for biologicals to move from supplemental status to strategic placement.
Regulatory harmonization efforts through the OECD and EU simplification initiatives aim to streamline approvals for low-risk products. The EU's biocontrol acceleration package, introduced in December 2025, creates faster procedures for market access. Brazil's 2024 "Marco Regulatório" for bioinsumos and India's draft Pesticides Management Bill—open for comments in early 2026—signal that large agricultural economies are updating frameworks to accommodate biological innovation.
For startups like Molagri, the window is defined by how quickly they can navigate the regulatory pipeline and demonstrate field performance at a price point growers will accept. GreenLight's Calantha took over four years to secure EPA registration, with six years of field trials preceding the 2024 approval. Vestaron's SPEAR followed a similar multi-year trajectory. The regulatory burden favors deep-pocketed players, though the EPA's biopesticides program suggests pathways are becoming clearer, if not necessarily faster.
Molecular targeting addresses the pollinator safety question directly. But it must also address resistance, scalability, and cost. Hassan and Jin's background in structural biology suggests they understand the molecular design challenge—the protein folding, the binding specificity, the degradation pathways. Whether they can translate that into a product that works at field scale, year after year, in varying conditions, for a price farmers will pay? That's the test for every company in this space.
What Comes Next
The $40 billion market projection for 2034 assumes continued regulatory tightening, ecological pressure, and technological progress. It also assumes growers will pay premiums for safety when conventional tools remain available, or mostly available. California and New York have made that calculation easier by restricting options. The EPA's ESA workplan may do the same in critical habitat areas. Europe has already crossed that threshold.
Molagri's four-person team isn't betting on the market alone. They're betting that molecular precision can deliver the efficacy conventional chemistry provides without the ecological trade-offs—that you can, in fact, kill the bad bugs without harming the good ones, at a molecular level so exact that resistance and non-target effects become engineering problems rather than inevitable consequences.
If they're right, the $40 billion figure may turn out to be conservative. If they're wrong, they'll join a long list of startups that discovered the distance between laboratory precision and field reality is wider than it looks on paper.
Either way, the bees—and the farmers who depend on them—will be watching.
