Nitroduck, a three-person startup in Brno, Czech Republic, has joined Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch with a plan to make "every crop editable." It is building on a duckweed engineering method that won the 2025 iGEM Grand Prize, and it arrives just as Europe rewrites its rules on gene-edited plants.
The timing may be luck or good reading of the calendar. Regulation (EU) 2026/1388 was adopted June 17, 2026, and entered into force July 16, according to EUR-Lex, the EU's official legal database.
What Nitroduck says it does
Its Y Combinator profile calls the company "Monsanto for yummy crops, but without pesticides," a line that is either charming or a little provocative, depending on how one feels about Monsanto. The stated ambitions are specific: coffee that tolerates heat waves, almonds that do not depend on pollinators, and pistachios that can cope with mild winters.
On its website, the company says it has made duckweed "5× faster to engineer." Matej Zámečník is chief executive. Matúš Grieš serves as chief technology officer, and Miroslav Rosputinský is chief science officer. In the material reviewed for this article, Nitroduck has not disclosed any funding.
The iGEM pedigree
The iGEM Brno 2025 team took the Grand Prize at the international synthetic biology competition, along with awards for Best Agriculture Project and Best Plant Synthetic Biology, according to the team's project wiki. Masaryk University said the students beat teams from Oxford and Cambridge in Paris with what they called a "Duckweed Toolbox."
The centerpiece is a method the wiki calls TAIFR. By the team's account, it shortens stable duckweed transformation, the process of getting a plant to permanently carry an introduced genetic change, from roughly five months to roughly one. It does so through in planta transposase-assisted insertion, in which a transposase enzyme helps place new DNA directly in living plant tissue.
Those figures are the team's own. This reporting could not independently verify them, and nothing reviewed here indicates whether the technique carries over to other crops.
Why the European rules matter
The new EU law sorts gene-edited plants into two categories. NGT-1 plants are treated as equivalent to conventionally bred ones and are exempt from labeling, though seed must still be labeled. NGT-2 plants remain under the bloc's GMO rules. The Council says traits such as herbicide tolerance, and the production of known insecticidal substances, are excluded from NGT-1.
Most provisions apply from mid-2028, with implementing acts expected by late 2027, per EUR-Lex. "Our farmers need practical solutions to adapt to climate change and remain competitive," said Maria Panayiotou, Cyprus's Minister of Agriculture, Rural Development and Environment, in a Council release dated April 21, 2026.
The American picture is murkier. A court vacated parts of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's 2020 SECURE Rule on Dec. 2, 2024, and the department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has said its earlier responses remain valid. Separately, a May 2023 Environmental Protection Agency rule exempts certain gene-edited plant-incorporated protectants. In February 2024, the Food and Drug Administration issued guidance saying that unintended changes from genome editing are likely to fall within the range of those produced by other breeding practices.
The pesticide problem
Nitroduck's pitch leans on an uncomfortable trend. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, global pesticide use reached 3.73 million tonnes of active ingredients in 2023. That was down 2% from 2022 but up 14% over a decade.
Application per hectare of cropland has doubled, from about 1.2 kilograms in 1990 to 2.4 kilograms in 2023. Meanwhile, CABI's Global Burden of Crop Loss program puts pre-harvest losses to biotic stresses, meaning pests and disease, at up to 40% globally.
Who else is in the field
Nitroduck will not be alone. Tropic, a UK company, announced a $105 million Series C on March 12, 2026, co-led by Forbion Bioeconomy Fund and Corteva Catalyst. It is scaling work on bananas and rice, and its website lists reduced-caffeine coffee in its pipeline. "We are entering a new era," said CEO Gilad Gershon.
Inari raised $144 million on Jan. 7, 2025, for multiplex editing, which alters several genes at once, in soy and corn as well as wheat. Pairwise has reported the first commercial sale of edited blackberries in Colombia. An FDA premarket meeting on its blackberry was listed for July 9, 2026, though the outcome was not available for this report.
Ohalo says its FruitionOne self-fertile Nonpareil almond is aimed at early orders in late 2026, with first commercial deliveries in 2027. Then there is Benson Hill, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 20, 2025, a reminder that the sector's headwinds are real.
Technical hurdles
Coffee, at least, looks like a credible target. A 2026 Springer report demonstrated CRISPR-Cas9 editing and protoplast-to-plant regeneration in Coffea arabica, and a 2025 study identified susceptibility genes tied to leaf rust resistance. In tomato, researchers have achieved parthenocarpy, fruit set without pollination, by editing the SlIAA9, ARF8 and TSP loci.
Still, tissue culture remains the main barrier in many species. Reviews published in 2025 and 2026 point to de novo meristem induction and viral delivery as possible workarounds. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) has cited one example of about $350 million in upfront commitments for gene editing programs in emerging markets, which suggests that money is not the only thing at stake.
Nitroduck's "all crops" claim rests on solving that regeneration problem. For now, the startup has a prize-winning duckweed method, three founders and a regulatory window that opens in mid-2028.
