Dutch Startup Aardaia Raises $5.4M to Create Protein Potato

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-08

Aardaia, a startup based in Wageningen, Netherlands, just announced a $5.4 million Seed round to turn wild plants into new crops and speed up development of its flagship product: the aardaker, a protein-rich tuber that could create a whole new crop category. ### The Funding Details The round was led by Point Nine, with new investors Astanor and Grey Silo joining in. Returning investor FoodLabs, which led the company's pre-Seed round, also participated. A group of angel investors backed this round too. "For most of history, inventing a new crop took millennia, so the world settled for improving the few it already had," said Padraic Flood, co-founder and CEO of Aardaia. "We can now design crops on demand, drawing on hundreds of millions of years of evolution to find plants that are already built to win. The aardaker is our first, and this round lets us put our foot on the accelerator." ### How Aardaia Reinvents Crops Founded in 2025 by Flood and Mike Henske (COO), Aardaia takes a totally different approach. Instead of re-engineering existing commodity crops like corn or wheat, they hunt down wild plant species that already have desirable traits and breed them into viable crops. No genetic modification involved. Here's the thing: most of the crops we rely on today were chosen way back in the Stone Age. That portfolio has barely changed since, even though climate, diet, and biological tools have shifted dramatically. ### Why This Matters Now Globally, about 95% of our calories come from just 30 plant species. But there are over 400,000 plant species on Earth. Most of them have never been domesticated for food or any other use. Aardaia thinks it's time to tap into what evolution has already produced: 400 million years of plant life on land, more than 160 trillion species-years of refinement. "The few crops we rely on are increasingly stressed by a changing climate," the startup said in a press release. "For Europe and much of the world, the problem is also one of sovereignty: the continent grows much of its own food yet imports most of its protein, which is costly, carbon-heavy and exposed to geopolitics. A protein crop Europe could grow for itself would change that." ### The Protein Potato The answer, according to Aardaia, is the aardaker (Lathyrus tuberosus). Think of it as a protein-rich potato. It combines the productivity of a root crop with the nitrogen-fixing biology of a legume. That means it needs no synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. And it has the potential to produce up to five times more protein per acre than any current crop. That's the target Aardaia is working toward. ### A Different Playbook While most of the industry keeps tweaking the same few species, Aardaia draws on wild plants that have already evolved the traits a new crop needs. They breed them into reality without any genetic modification or gene editing. The company builds massive genomic datasets. They use whole-genome sequencing combined with in-depth phenotyping to predict in silico which genetics will perform before a seed even hits the ground. This year alone, Aardaia is screening three-quarters of a million unique aardaker genotypes. With the new funding, they aim to push toward two million next year. ### What Investors See "At Point Nine we invest mainly in software and AI, so a plant-breeding company wasn't an obvious fit," said a Point Nine representative. "But after my first call with Padraic and Mike, I was hooked! Humans have barely created a new crop in thousands of years because it was impossibly slow. Aardaia compresses that into years, combining old-fashioned breeding with modern genomics and AI. I couldn't be more thrilled to work with the team on their mission to make our food system more resilient, one new crop at a time." - **Key takeaway:** Aardaia is compressing millennia of crop evolution into just a few years using modern genomics and AI. - **What's next:** With $5.4 million in new funding, they're scaling up screening to two million genotypes next year. - **Why watch:** If successful, the aardaker could transform protein production in Europe and beyond.