Amatera raises €6M to speed up the development of climate resilient crops

Amatera, a Paris-based biotechnology company, announced the closing of its latest funding round of €6 million in equity. The round was co-led by Demea Sustainable Investment (ex-Demeter) and Oyster Bay Venture Capital, with participation from existing investors - PINC, Mudcake, and Exceptional Ventures.

A persistent challenge in both conventional and emerging breeding technologies is the time intensive and labor-heavy process of generating and screening new plant varieties. Amatera’s proprietary platform addresses this bottleneck by combining plant cell biology, robotics, and artificial intelligence to automate the discovery of high-performing traits at the cellular level. The result is a process that is up to 2x faster and 10x more cost-effective than current industry standards.

Amatera started with proprietary development of new varieties of wine grapes and coffee and is now partnering with leading seed companies and agrifood players to integrate its platform and leverage its expertise into commercial breeding programs. The new capital will support expansion beyond coffee and wine grapes into annual crops, further scale automation and commercialization of its genetics platform.

"It can take more than 20 years and millions of euros to create a new coffee or wine grape variety with conventional breeding techniques. We are accelerating the breeding of perennial crops to create new varieties at a fraction of the cost and time. Our goal is to outpace climate change by dramatically expanding natural variation," said Omar Dekkiche, co-founder andCEO of Amatera. By identifying natural cellular variation early in development, Amatera enables the rapid creation and evaluation of non-GMO varieties. This approach significantly shortens breeding timelines while reducing cost and technical risk.

Amatera is deploying its platform to develop high-value perennial crops and is currently focused on:

• Climate-resilient coffee: Developing varieties better adapted to higher temperatures and increased pathogen pressure while preserving premium flavor profiles.

• Disease-resistant wine grapes: Addressing destructive vineyard diseases to reduce chemical inputs and safeguard the long-term sustainability and viability of key wine regions.

With the €6 million raised in seed funding, Amatera is expanding its engineering and scientific teams. “This funding enables us to scale our technology from coffee and grapes to the staple crops that feed the world, while strengthening our R&D capabilities to industrialize our patented robotics and AI platform,” said Lucie Kriegshauser, co-founder and CTO of Amatera.

“Amatera has developed a highly differentiated platform combining plant biology, automation and AI to address one of agriculture’s most urgent challenges: climate resilience. By dramatically accelerating breeding timelines compared to traditional approaches, the company offers a scalable, non-GMO and cost-effective solution for perennial crops such as wine grapes and coffee but also for annual crops. We are proud to support this visionary team with strong scientific depth and a clear ambition to industrialize the next generation of crop genetics,”, says Stéphanie Hillard, Investment director at Demea Invest.

Divya Murthy, Principal at Oyster Bay adds, “From our first conversations, it was clear that Omar and Lucie make an incredibly complementary team with a solid scientific approach to navigate the path from lab to field. Our strategy includes backing foundational technologies that strengthen agricultural resilience and food security, and Amatera directly addresses a structural bottleneck in crop development. Resilient crops will not be optional in the future, and we believe Amatera is building a scalable technology the industry will increasingly rely onto meet this challenge.”