Belgian Rainbow Crops closes €9.7M seed to scale AI-guided multiplex gene editing across complex polygenic crop traits

Crop breeding has always been subject to a fundamental imbalance: the most commercially important traits, such as yield, drought tolerance and heat resilience, are among the most difficult to engineer because they are governed by networks of interacting genes. Conventional breeding can take a decade or more to meaningfully alter a complex polygenic trait. Although gene editing has accelerated these timelines, most approaches still address one or a handful of genes at a time, leaving the full complexity of these trait networks largely untouched.

Rainbow Crops, a Ghent-based startup spun out of the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology in 2025 and co-founded by Giacomo Bastianelli and Prof. Hilde Nelissen, has built a platform that takes a different approach. AI constructs a knowledge graph from public datasets, scientific literature, and proprietary omics data, building a systems-level picture of how genes interact to produce a given trait and what the downstream effects of modifying each one are likely to be. That model guides the editing step: multiplex CRISPR-based editing produces populations of plants carrying up to 50 to 100 simultaneous genetic modifications, designed around the combinations the AI identifies as most promising. High-throughput phenotyping screens up to 16,000 plants per run, and the resulting performance and transcriptomic data feeds back into the model, refining the predictions that drive the next round of edits. Proof of concept has been validated in corn.

In June 2026, Rainbow Crops closed an oversubscribed €9.7 million seed round led by LIFTT EuroInvest, the venture vehicle formed through a partnership between LIFTT and the European Investment Bank. Existing investors AIF, PINC, and VIB participated alongside new investors Corteva Catalyst and Maia Ventures. The capital will fund development of the AI-assisted multiplex editing capabilities and platform expansion across additional crops.

Sources: Rainbow Crops | AgFunderNews

Founders: Giacomo Bastianelli, Hilde Nelissen