- Mycovolt aims to detect crop stress early by decoding plants’ electrical signals.
- Following UK potato trials, it is seeking rice-sector partnerships across Asia.
- Tackling key technical challenge of distinguish different diseases.
Speaking to AgNavigator at the Asia Pacific Agri-Food Summit in Singapore this week, founder Sam Jellard explained that Mycovolt’s technology was built around the premise that plants constantly generate electrical signals that can reveal their physiological status.
By capturing and interpreting those signals, the company aims to help farmers detect crop stress earlier and more precisely than conventional monitoring methods.
“What we’re doing is tapping into the electrical signalling language of plants,” said Jellard.
The system consists of proprietary hardware that records electrical activity from plants and analyses the resulting data.
Founded in 2025, the company has secured GBP2.3m (USD3.94m) in research funding from the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA).
Today, it is working to take its plant monitoring technology from the laboratory into commercial agriculture.
“We are at a stage now where we are deploying technology from the lab into the field,” Jellard said.
Mycovolt has already begun validating the technology through field trials with commercial farmers in the UK, including work with Dyson Farming Research.
One of the initial focus areas has been drought detection in potatoes, a crop that is particularly sensitive to water stress.
Jellard highlighted that while soil moisture sensors can signal dry conditions in the field, they provide only a proxy for crop health and cannot directly determine whether a plant is under stress.
While Jellard declined to disclose details of the platform on account of ongoing intellectual property applications, he described it as a “non-invasive, biocompatible approach”.
He added that it differs from techniques currently used in research, which often rely on inserting electrodes directly into plant tissues.
Furthermore, those methods can work well in controlled environments but are difficult to scale commercially and are often restricted to crops with larger stems.
“Our approach means you’re not limited by the physical form of the crop,” said Jellard.
From potato fields to rice paddies
The company’s goal is to create a monitoring platform that can be deployed across a broad range of crops, including cereals and rice.
In particular, Jellard sees significant opportunities in rice production.
It is seeking partnerships with rice growers and industry stakeholders across Asia to understand how electrical signalling data could be used to identify disease and other agronomic challenges.
One area of interest is rice blast, a disease that continues to cause substantial losses in rice-growing regions around the world.
Mycovolt’s long-term vision is to enable more targeted crop protection by helping farmers identify stressed parts of a field before symptoms become visible.
He added that the technology could eventually support site-specific treatment strategies, potentially reducing input costs and environmental impact.
According to Jellard, one of the company’s biggest technical challenges is teaching algorithms to distinguish between different causes of stress.
“It’s all well and good that you can tell if a plant is stressed or not, but it’s differentiating what that stress is,” said Jellard.
Mycovolt has investigated drought stress and disease-related stress, including potato blight.
The next phase of development will focus on identifying specific stress signatures associated with different pathogens and environmental conditions.
Partnerships in Asia are expected to play an important role in that process, particularly for building datasets related to rice diseases and production systems.
“That’s why we want to work with local partners here. We want to not only detect rice stress, but then ultimately determine if this rice blast, rice blight, or a different kind of disease,” said Jellard.
Looking ahead, Mycovolt plans to strengthen its machine learning capabilities through new hires and larger field trials.
Jellard said two software engineers are set to join the company to help develop models capable of decoding plant stress signals and differentiating between diseases and other stress factors.
The startup is also discussing additional commercial trials with several large industry players.
“As our technology is developing, our reach and the scope of the trials we can do is increasing,” he said.
The company may also consider raising additional capital towards the end of 2027 as it expands its commercial activities and continues development of its crop monitoring platform.
