OlsAro develops crop varieties that are resilient to environmental stressors with the aim of making “unfarmable land farmable again”.
“We are on a mission to accelerate seed genetics and fast-track climate resilience cereals… Around 20% of cultivated lands globally are contaminated, but there is not so much innovation in the space,” said OlsAro CEO Elén Faxö.
Its climate-adapted crops are developed with its proprietary AI-driven forward genetics platform.
“One of our main advantages is that we can commercialise non-GMO seeds globally. While we use gene editing primarily for technology development – like trait validation – our commercial varieties are developed using a population-based approach. This means we face no regulatory hurdles worldwide, which is a huge market advantage. On top of that, our tech platform is much faster than traditional breeding methods and other approaches out there,” said Faxö.
Its first product is a salt-tolerant wheat that has shown a 52% yield increase over a moderately salt-tolerant variety under saline conditions in Bangladesh.
Speaking to AgTechNavigator, Faxö said its wheat has advanced the furthest in Bangladesh, where it is currently undergoing regulatory trials, and that the aim is to launch it in Bangladesh in 2027.
“[Bangladesh] has a huge challenge of soil salinity, with around one million hectares affected. At the same time, there’s an increasing consumption of wheat, and not so much domestically grown wheat,” said Faxö.
After that, the company plans to scale up to additional markets from 2029 onwards.
“We see a huge demand for salt tolerant wheat out there,” said Faxö.
Future plans
OlsAro’s vision is global, Faxö emphasised, highlighting its work in South American and African markets.
Additionally, the firm is developing crops with traits such as heat tolerance and improved nitrogen efficiency.
At the moment, the focus will be on cereals, which have a lot of “transferable technology”, said Faxö.
“We can work with any crop, really. But we think we have a huge market opportunity in wheat, and if we scale our cereals, we are looking huge markets. So that’s what we are targeting as of now.”
OlsAro is a spin-off from Lund University and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, backed by years of research from chief technical officer Henrik Aronsson and technical advisor Olof Olsson.
Recently, Faxö was announced as part of the 2025 cohort of Women Founders and Funders Singapore
Moving forward, the company is also looking to raise funds to further its advancement.
“Our aim with the funding is to accelerate trait and variety development, as well as further advance our proprietary tech platform. We also plan to speed up market access through additional dialogues, contracts, and marketing efforts.”
In April, the startup announced that it had raised a €2.5 million pre-seed round led by Future Food Fund and PINC, with participation from AgFunder, FLORA Ventures, Mudcake, and its previous investors.
