On a drizzly morning in early March at Denmark's Technical University, a spinout called Mycoverse closed what might seem like a modest pre-seed round—€2.4 million. The company, founded in July 2024 and about eighteen months old at the time of the March 3 announcement, has ambitions that are anything but small.
The company, co-founded by researchers Svend Petersen and Niels Bjerg Jensen, is betting it can coax nature's own chemistry into doing what synthetic pesticides increasingly cannot: protect crops without poisoning the ground beneath them. Their weapon of choice? Bioactive compounds extracted from fungi, screened through an AI-powered platform that sifts through decades of microbial samples collected at DTU's labs.
Future Food Fund and Germany's High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) co-led the March 3 round, with PINC—the venture arm of Finland's Paulig Group—joining as well. The deal brings Mycoverse's total haul to €4.3 million, counting earlier support from BioInnovation Institute's Venture Lab and Venture House programs, which contributed roughly €1.9 million in the period leading up to and following the formal spinout.
When Potatoes Won't Stay Healthy
Mycoverse's first target is almost prosaic in its specificity: potato late blight. The disease, caused by the pathogen Phytophthora infestans, has plagued farmers since the Irish famine and now represents somewhere between a €1.6 billion and $1.9 billion global problem, depending on whose estimates you trust.
The urgency has sharpened recently. A peer-reviewed study released in February 2025 documented a particularly troubling development—the EU43 genotype of the pathogen showing resistance to mandipropamid, one of Europe's go-to fungicide ingredients. That's the kind of news that sends agrochemical executives scrambling and gives startups like Mycoverse an opening.
Unlike many biocontrol approaches that deploy live microorganisms (which can be finicky about temperature, storage, and field conditions), Mycoverse's strategy centers on fungal metabolites—non-living chemical compounds that slot into farmers' existing spray equipment. It's a practical concession to an industry that doesn't easily embrace radical workflow changes.
AI Meets Four Decades of Fungal Samples
The technical foundation here traces back to an unusual collaboration between DTU Bioengineering and FMC Agricultural Solutions, which together screened more than 10,000 fungal strains. DTU had amassed a 40-year collection of fungi—an archive that suddenly became far more valuable once paired with what Mycoverse describes as a high-throughput omics platform guided by machine learning.
According to materials shared with investors, the company identified viable potato blight candidates in five months. That's fast, perhaps faster than the founders themselves initially expected. Greenhouse trials are complete; field validation is the next hurdle.
Spending the Money
The fresh €2.4 million will bankroll two years of field trials across EU markets, a necessary gauntlet for proving the lead compound works outside controlled environments. Beyond that, priorities include scaling up production (always harder than it sounds), assembling a regulatory dossier for European approval of the first active ingredient, and teeing up the next two product candidates.
Grapevines are on the roadmap—another crop where fungal diseases and pesticide resistance collide. The company operates from DTU's Kongens Lyngby campus north of Copenhagen with a team that current filings place in the two-to-ten employee range, though that figure will presumably grow if the field trials pan out.
The Bigger Picture
Mycoverse is hardly alone in chasing biological pest control. The biopesticides market has become crowded with contenders, each claiming some edge—whether novel bacteria, RNA interference, or, in this case, fungal chemistry. Future Food Fund, a Dutch agrifood specialist that typically writes checks between €500,000 and €3 million, has made planetary boundaries its investing lens. HTGF, Germany's public-private seed vehicle, has backed over 800 startups since 2005, though its hit rate in agtech specifically is harder to parse. PINC tends to deploy smaller strategic checks—€200,000 to €1 million—aimed at companies that might eventually matter to Paulig's broader food portfolio.
Whether Mycoverse's fungal metabolites prove commercially viable in the field remains an open question. But the resistance spreading through Europe's potato fields suggests that farmers and agrochemical giants alike will be watching closely.
