Startups attacking the two bottlenecks in biological crop protection — the active ingredients, and the infrastructure to deploy them.
The agrochemical industry has run on synthetic chemistry for a hundred years. That’s changing faster than most people in the industry expect. You’ve seen the pitch. Bio-based active ingredient, strong efficacy data, nice regulatory story. What you’re less likely to see is a credible plan for getting that biology to survive the shelf, the truck, and the field. A microbial biopesticide that works in the lab but dies in a warehouse in July is not a product. It’s a science project.
That gap is where the biologicals market is quietly splitting in two. One camp is developing novel biocontrol agents, each betting on a different biological mechanism to replace synthetic chemistry. The other is building the formulation, manufacturing, and delivery infrastructure those agents need to work at scale. The dependency runs both directions.
The money is moving. The infrastructure isn’t.
The agricultural biologicals market hit roughly $16.6 billion in 2025. The U.S. EPA has cut biopesticide registration times by 40% since 2024. The EU’s Farm to Fork Strategy mandates a 20% reduction in fertilizer use and 50% cut in nutrient losses by 2030. Regulators are doing half the sales job for biologicals companies.
But most of the capital flows to the ingredient side — novel strains, new chemistries, better actives. The infrastructure layer, where formulation and delivery problems actually get solved, stays comparatively thin. That’s the imbalance worth watching.
The ingredient makers: five mechanisms, one goal
There is no “bio Roundup” coming. The replacement for synthetic pesticides isn’t one product. It’s botanical chemistry, bioherbicides, nanotechnology, fungal endophytes, extremophile microbials with each targeting a different pest, crop, or mechanism. Biological systems are specific by nature, and the startups that lean into that specificity tend to have the sharpest products.
Shivraj Bhosale — Hi Cell Crop Sciences
Hi Cell Crop Sciences is built on a plant elicitor-based platform using GRAS bioactives, enabling systemic modulation of plant physiology with consistent performance. Our current focus is on Hi Cell Renova® (post-harvest senescence modulator) and Hi Cell Eradico® (systemic Lepidopteran & Hemipteran pest inhibitor). A broader pipeline exists for phased scale-up.
Luis Barboza — NovoBioLabs
Bioherbicides are the hardest category in biological crop protection. Weeds are aggressive, diverse, and fast-adapting — which is why glyphosate has been so hard to replace. NovoBioLabs is developing NH-08, a nature-derived bioherbicide that they claim delivers broad-spectrum weed control at glyphosate-level efficacy, alongside a biopolymer adjuvant technology (NJ-18) designed to improve how biological herbicides interact with plant surfaces. If the field data holds, this is one of the most commercially significant biologicals plays in agriculture.
“At NovoBioLabs, we’re proving biological crop protection can be reliable at scale, with validated performance across diverse crops, climates, and real farming conditions.”
— Luis Barboza
Albert Denisov — BOSAGRA
BOSAGRA’s SCS-Tech platform uses nanocolloidal silver — not the dubious supplement kind, but engineered nanocomposites registered under EU Regulation 2019/1009 and tested under GEP/GLP standards. Their Silver Mix and Silver Phos products function as both foliar nanofertilizers and non-antibiotic fungicides. Already deployed across 16 countries with EU CE certification, BOSAGRA is the most commercially advanced company in this group. The open question is whether nanosilver faces the same regulatory scrutiny that other nanoparticle technologies have encountered in food and agriculture.
Gal Admati — Omerna & Yoav Shkolnik — Fungit Biosolutions
These are two teams arriving at the same mechanism from different starting points. Endophytes are fungi that live inside the plant; the plant becomes its own delivery system, no spraying, no surface coating. Omerna uses this approach for both crop protection and shelf-life extension, with a standardization problem that’s real — endophyte colonization rates vary by crop, climate, and application method, so quality control is harder than a spray-on formulation. Fungit comes at it from a different angle: they’re building proprietary biobanks of fungal strains isolated from plants adapted to stressful environments — deserts, salt flats, extreme heat — on the bet that strains evolved under pressure make more robust biocontrol agents. They’ve shown results in citrus and melons. When two independent teams converge on fungal biocontrol from different sourcing strategies, it’s a signal the technique has left the “interesting in a lab” phase.
Robin Steele — Ancient Organics
Ancient Organics is mining extreme environments — places where microbes have evolved unusual survival mechanisms — and turning those organisms into agricultural products. Their portfolio spans bio-insecticides for soil-borne pests, biofungicides, and microbial consortia for soil health and productivity. The moat is the microbial library itself: a proprietary collection of extremophile strains that competitors would have to independently source and screen. At TRL 9, their soil health consortia product is the furthest along, with others at TRL 4–6.
Enterprise demand signal: Multiple active requests point to this space, including searches for next-generation crop protection technologies and herbicide-enabling innovations. Companies are looking.
The infrastructure side: making biology survive the supply chain
A microbial biopesticide is a living product. It can die in transit. Lose potency on the shelf. Fail in the field if soil conditions don’t support colonization. These aren’t science problems. They’re engineering and formulation problems. A different kind of startup is solving them.
Miguel Berretta — MicroIN
MicroIN is a formulation company focused on the viability and stability of microorganisms for agriculture. Their work targets the specific challenge that kills most biological products before they reach the field: the microbes don’t survive storage, transport, or tank mixing. MicroIN develops advanced formulations that improve how biologicals hold up under real supply chain conditions. It’s a picks-and-shovels play — the kind of company that wins regardless of which active ingredient dominates, because they all need formulation help.
“The gap between a promising microorganism in the lab and a product that works in the field is almost entirely a formulation problem. Biological inputs fail because living organisms are sensitive, and most formulation approaches weren’t built with that sensitivity in mind. We built MicroIN to close that gap, using bioinspired microencapsulation to protect microorganisms through every stress point between production and the crop.” — Miguel Berretta
Javier Jofre Amaya — Atens
Atens operates at the manufacturing layer. Their platform combines proprietary microbial strains with industrial-scale production and custom formulation for agricultural biologics — biofertilizers, biostimulants, and biocontrol products. They also offer microbiological services supported by omics sciences, which means partner companies can access strain characterization and optimization without building in-house capabilities. At TRL 8, Atens is closer to a contract manufacturer for biologicals than a product company, and that positioning may be exactly right for a market where dozens of startups have strains but few can produce them at scale.
Atsuo Suzuki — TOWING
TOWING approaches the problem from the soil side. Their functional biochar technology creates the conditions for biology to work once it’s applied — a stable, carbon-rich substrate that supports microbial colonization and soil microbiome health. Combined with their precision microbiome protocols, it’s a soil preparation layer that sits beneath and supports whatever biological products a grower uses. The regenerative agriculture angle adds a carbon sequestration story, which increasingly matters for companies managing Scope 3 emissions in agricultural supply chains.
The stack won’t build itself
The ingredient makers need the infrastructure players to scale. A biocontrol agent that can’t survive a warehouse in July is unsellable. And the infrastructure players need differentiated actives to formulate, a world-class delivery system with nothing worth delivering is just engineering for its own sake.
If you’re scouting this space, the practical question is which layer you want to partner on. Need novel actives? The ingredient side has five different mechanisms represented here alone. Bottlenecked on getting existing biologicals to work reliably at scale? The infrastructure layer is where the leverage is.
This market won’t consolidate the way synthetic chemistry did. There’s no single winner. It’s a stack with ingredients, formulation, delivery, and soil prep; the startups building it sit on different layers. The transition from chemistry to biology in crop protection is underway. The part that’s still unresolved is who connects the layers.
