By Autumn Demberger, Global AgInvesting Media
French agtech startup Amatera has secured $7 million (€6 million) in seed funding to accelerate the development of climate-resilient perennial crops, including coffee beans and wine grapes. The round was co-led by Demea Sustainable Investment and Oyster Bay, with participation from PINC, Mudcake, and Exceptional Ventures. The company plans to use the capital to scale its breeding platform and expand beyond its initial focus on coffee and wine grapes.
Founded in 2022 by CEO Omar Dekkiche and plant scientist Lucie Kriegshauser, PhD, Amatera combines plant cell culture, robotics and artificial intelligence to modernize crop breeding. Its goal is to reduce the time and cost required to develop improved perennial varieties — an area traditionally constrained by long development cycles. According to research from CTAHR, conventional breeding and genetic engineering of crops can typically take 10-15 years — and in some cases up to 20 — and cost millions. This method also requires breeding multiple generations to stabilize traits, which can account for the long timeframe. Amatera believes its approach to be twice as fast and more cost-effective than standard industry approaches.
A Look Inside Promised Efficiencies
At the heart of Amatera’s model is high-throughput screening performed at the plant cell culture stage, rather than after plants are fully regenerated.
Traditionally, breeders induce variation, regenerate large numbers of plants, and then genotype and evaluate each to identify promising traits. Amatera is eliminating the screening bottleneck by isolating each cell to grow individually in plant cell culture within the lab. Using physical and chemical methods, it is creating libraries of diverse cell lines at a much faster pace by looking at the cells for desirable genetic markers. Only selected candidates are regenerated into whole plants for nursery and field trials.
By shifting screening upstream, the company aims to eliminate one of breeding’s biggest bottlenecks: regenerating and growing thousands of plants only to discard most of them. Screening at the cellular level enables Amatera to narrow the pipeline early, saving resources and accelerating development.
According to Dekkiche, this same automated screening approach can also be applied to cell lines produced through other techniques, including gene editing.
While cells in culture do not photosynthesize or interact with soil microbes as whole plants do, Amatera focuses on genetic markers known to correlate with plant-level traits. For example, Dekkiche told AGFunderNews, genes involved in caffeine synthesis are well characterized. By introducing variability in those genes, the company can modulate caffeine content in resulting coffee plants.
Why It Matters
Climate change is set to threaten nearly 70% of current global wine-growing regions by 2100, according to recent reports, due to increased heatwaves, water scarcity and extreme weather. Likewise, drought, rising temperatures, and unpredictable rainfall pose existential threat to global coffee production, with projections that Arabica coffee — arguably one of the most popular beans worldwide — faces 50% loss of suitable growing areas by 2050.
By tackling the screening bottleneck at the cellular level, Amatera further aims to compress breeding timelines, cut costs, and deliver climate-smart crop varieties better suited to rising temperatures, emerging diseases, and shifting growing conditions.
For perennial crops, Amatera develops and tests new varieties internally, with plans to license them to growers and industry partners. In annual crops, the company positions itself as a technology provider, offering its platform to seed companies for integration into their breeding pipelines.
Over the coming year, Amatera expects to sign multiple partnerships in annual crops while continuing to advance its perennial pipeline.
The content put forth by Global AgInvesting News and its parent company Arc Network LLC is intended to be used and must be used for informational purposes only. All information or other material herein is not to be construed as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Global AgInvesting and Arc Network LLC are not a fiduciary in any manner, and the reader assumes the sole responsibility of evaluating the merits and risks associated with the use of any information or other content on this site.