Agriculture is under growing pressure to produce more with fewer resources, while reducing emissions, protecting crop yields, and improving operational efficiency.
At this year’s World Agri-Tech London event, a new generation of start-ups are demonstrating how emerging technologies could help address these challenges.
From autonomous robotics and precision crop protection to microbial discovery, green ammonia, and soil-powered sensors, AgNavigator spoke with nine innovators to learn more about their technologies, ambitions, and vision for the future of farming.
Meet the start ups
- Antobot: Intelligent, autonomous robots
- BioSense Solutions: Advanced algorithms to count microorganisms
- Atmonia: Single-step electrochemical process
- Yngvi.bio: Precision crop-protection
- Bindbridge: AI-based molecular discovery platform
- Bactery: Turning soil into electricity
- Ecosort: Physics-based quality control
- Bactobio: New fungicide classes
- Moving Floor Concept: 85% lower ammonia emissions
Antobot: Intelligent, autonomous robots
Q: What does Antobot do?
A: Antobot develops and deploys intelligent, autonomous robots that help growers perform essential tasks including crop protection, scouting, and logistics. We are addressing two of agriculture’s biggest challenges: persistent labor shortages and the need to produce more efficiently, with fewer chemical inputs, lower costs, and less environmental impact.
Q: Which application could have the biggest impact, and why?
A: We believe autonomous UV-C crop protection could have the greatest immediate impact. It automates a repetitive, time-sensitive task while reducing reliance on fungicides, lowering disease pressure, and supporting healthier crops and stronger yields. Most importantly, it offers growers clear, measurable operational, and commercial value.
Q: Why is World Agri-Tech London important for Antobot?
A: World Agri-Tech brings together the growers, agribusinesses, investors, and technology partners capable of accelerating real-world adoption. As a featured start-up, it gives Antobot an important platform to share what we have learned from commercial deployments, build new partnerships, and demonstrate how agricultural robotics can deliver practical, measurable value on farms today.
Biosense Solutions: Advanced algorithms to count microorganisms
Q: What does Biosense Solutions do?
A: BioSense Solutions provides technology and advanced algorithms for counting microorganisms and quantifying the growth of biopesticides and plant pathogens. Our fast, sensitive, high-throughput assays help crop-sci companies develop and evaluate new biologicals and formulations on plant pathogens.
Q: How could faster measurement of fungal spore germination improve the development and validation of new biological crop protection products?
A: Automated, precise counting of microorganisms before an experiment improves consistency, reduces the need to repeat tests, and saves valuable time. Accurately quantifying biopesticide or a plant pathogen growth and inhibition enables crop SCI companies to assess new products more effectively and make better-informed decisions throughout product development and production.
Q: What does success look like for Biosense Solutions over the next 12 months?
A: Last year, we launched µCount3D – a new standard in microbial counting. It counts bacteria in a defined volume and uses deep-learning algorithms to identify and quantify fungal spores and yeasts. The system has been very well received, and success over the next 12 months would mean increasing global awareness and helping even more scientific teams improve their microbial analysis.
Atmonia: Single-step electrochemical process
Q: What does Atmonia do?
A: Today, nitrogen fertiliser is produced from ammonia, using natural gas as the key feedstock. Natural gas is one of the commodities most exposed to changes in global geopolitics, increasing cost for farmers. We are solving this by developing a single-step electrochemical process that makes ammonia from air, water, and renewable electricity, at ambient temperature and pressure.
Q: How could decentralised green ammonia production change the way farmers access and use fertilisers, particularly in regions that currently depend on complex supply chains?
A: Atmonia gives growers security of supply by allowing them to produce their own ammonia-based fertilisers on site. A farm, or a group of neighbouring farms, with access to renewable power could produce its own nitrogen with a known cost rather than one set by global commodity markets. Our first commercial unit is sized at roughly 150 tonnes of ammonia per year, which is farm scale asset for farms of around 3-600ha, a scale which allows growers to own and manage their own supply.
Q: What makes Atmonia’s approach unique within the industry?
A: Our approach is a single step: nitrogen and water react directly in our cell, in aqueous conditions, using a proprietary catalyst that contains no precious metals and there is no hydrogen production stage either. Atmonia has the potential to achieve the lowest theoretical energy consumption number of 12 MWh/t.
Yngvi Bio: Precision crop-protection
Q: What does Yngvi Bio do?
A: Yngvi Bio is developing a new class of precision crop-protection products built around protein-based delivery containers carrying tailored novel biological actives. Our goal is to deliver effective and cost-competitive pest control that plugs into existing farming practices, with as little product and application burden as possible.
Q: How does combining targeted delivery with protein-based biocides enable a more precise approach to crop protection than conventional treatments?
A: Our delivery container protects the biological active from environmental degradation and makes it available where it can be most effective in the target pest. By tailoring both the targeting mechanism and the active payload, we can focus treatment more selectively than conventional products that are distributed broadly and may need to be reapplied several times. This precision enables effective control with lower doses, fewer applications, and less exposure for beneficial and non-target organisms.
Q: Why is World Agri-Tech London an important event for Yngvi Bio?
A: With our first product prototype entering field trials in New Zealand, Yngvi Bio is at an important transition point. We are looking to expand our network of field-trial and commercial partners to demonstrate both the technology’s real-world performance and the depth of our wider platform. World Agri-Tech brings those potential partners together in one place.
Bindbridge: AI-based molecular discovery platform
Q: What does Bindbridge do?
A: Bindbridge is an AI-based molecular discovery platform that identifies molecular glues for agriculture. Our computational approach aims to enable faster and cheaper discovery of novel agricultural products using targeted protein degradation. This new class of herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and plant trait enhancers promises to be both more effective and safer than traditional alternatives – helping agriculture overcome rising pest and weed resistance.
Q: What opportunities remain untapped in the biologicals sector, and where do you see the greatest potential for innovation?
A: The greatest opportunity lies in translating biological understanding into rationally designed crop-protection products. Computational discovery can move the industry beyond screening repeatedly mined chemical libraries, enabling new modes of action that overcome resistance while delivering safer, more selective, and more efficient products.
Q: What makes Bindbridge’s approach unique within the industry?
A: We combine targeted protein degradation – a new mode of action for crop protection – with the established product advantages of small-molecule chemistry. Our computational platform is designed to rationally discover small molecule molecular glues that selectively remove disease- or survival-critical proteins from weeds and pests.
Bactery: Turning soil into electricity
Q: What does Bactery do?
A: Bactery turns soil into electricity. Our buried systems use naturally occurring soil microorganisms to generate continuous power for agricultural sensors and other connected devices. Agriculture is becoming increasingly connected, but almost every device in the field relies on batteries or solar. We want to remove that power constraint and enable sensors to be installed in the field and left to run for years without routine battery replacement or charging.
Q: What has surprised you most during the development of your bacterial platform, and what has it revealed about its potential in agriculture?
A: What has surprised us most is just how resilient the biology is. We’ve taken Bactery from controlled laboratory conditions into real fields, across different crops, seasons, and soil types, and continued to generate electricity. It changed how we thought about the opportunity. What began as a way of powering sensors has the potential to become something much bigger: because the electricity is generated by microbial activity, the power signal itself can also tell us something about the biological activity of the soil.
Q: What does success look like for Bactery over the next 12 months?
Moving from technical validation to commercial scale. We already have more than 100 systems deployed across UK agricultural sites. Success now means seeing Bactery integrated with agricultural sensors and hardware, expanding deployments internationally, and demonstrating that soil-powered technology can move from tens of devices in the field to hundreds and ultimately thousands.
Ecosort: Physics-based quality control
Q: What does Ecosort do?
A: Ecosort builds an integrated hardware and software ecosystem that brings objective, physics-based quality control to the agricultural supply chain. By deploying sensor-rich harvest scales with embedded Machine Learning (Edge AI) in the field and spectrometer/NDIR rigs at the packhouse, we capture irrefutable Quality Index (QI) metrics at the point of origin, replacing a blind supply chain with trustworthy data.
Q: What opportunities does on-farm quality assessment create for growers and suppliers looking to reduce waste and improve product value throughout the supply chain?
A: On-farm assessment transforms a blind supply chain into a transparent, predictable one. For growers, it provides trustworthy documentation of their produce’s quality at the moment of harvest, establishing a “verified origin” that secures its true value. It enables seamless QI track-and-trace before the produce is loaded onto a truck. This proactive approach eliminates the friction and economic loss of transporting goods long distances only to have them rejected, drastically reducing both logistical costs and preventable food waste.
A: Why is World Agri-Tech London an important event for Ecosort?
As we transition from our successful pilot phase in Norway to broader commercial production, World Agri-Tech London is the ideal platform to scale our network. We are seeking strategic investors who understand the long-term defensibility of integrated hardware and deep tech. We are looking to connect with enterprise buyers, wholesalers, and supply chain collaborators to establish pilot projects outside of Norway, demonstrating how our verified-origin ecosystem can optimize operations and reduce waste.
Bactobio: New fungicide classes
Q: What does Bactobio do?
A: We culture previously unculturable microbes and screen them for new fungicide classes that are safe and effective. We can target any disease and are currently building large portfolios of new classes targeting Septoria and Potato late blight, combatting rising fungicide resistance.
Q: Your platform is uncovering previously inaccessible microbes as a source of new crop protection solutions. What has been the most promising discovery so far, and what does it reveal about the untapped potential of microbial biodiversity in agriculture?
A: We have discovered 5 to 10 new classes that look safe and effective in vitro and in vivo against septoria. They bypass current resistances, and we are scaling their production. Meanwhile, the rate of discovery is continuing to increase with over 10 novel, active, classes discovered every year, showing just how much new chemistry can be discovered from this bioresource
Q: What makes your approach unique within the industry?
A: We have uniquely cultured about 20% of the world’s culturable microbes. That gives us an untapped bioresource nobody else has. Over the last six years, we built multimodal datasets, from microbe to new compound class, giving us an unmatched understanding of microbes and their chemistry. This means we can rapidly identify entirely new fungicide classes.
Moving Floor Concept: 85% lower ammonia emissions
Q: What does Moving Floor Concept do?
A: The Moving Floor system automates the cleaning of livestock housing by using a slow-moving conveyor belt that removes manure and waste multiple times a day without using water.
Q: How can innovations in manure management contribute to both farm efficiency and environmental sustainability objectives?
A: The benefits are both environmental and operational. Our system has demonstrated up to 85% lower ammonia emissions, while automated cleaning has shown around 25% labour savings in practice. It creates a clean, dry environment that supports very high animal-welfare standards, including use of bedding, long tails and free-farrowing systems, while supporting production with very low or potentially no routine antibiotic use. The investment is designed to deliver a payback of approximately 3 to 6 years, depending on farm configuration and local economics.
Q: What does success look like for Moving Floor Concept over the next 12 months?
A: The next 12 months are about moving decisively from commercial validation to scale. We want to convert our current pilots and demonstrations with major pork producers into larger commercial installations, particularly in China, Brazil, and Benelux, while continuing the pathway towards formal ammonia-emission recognition in Europe.
Experience the innovation first hand
While the technologies featured vary widely in application, they share a common goal: helping growers and the wider agricultural sector do more with less. Whether through automation, advanced biologicals, novel crop protection approaches or data-driven decision making, these start-ups highlight the breadth of innovation emerging across the agrifood value chain.
