moa Technology Limited, an Oxford, UK-based crop protection discovery company, raised $44M in Series B funding.
The round was led by Lansdowne Partners with participation from Oxford Science Enterprises, Parkwalk Advisors, BGF Investments, Bits x Bites Growth Fund, IP Group, and University of Oxford.
The company intends to use the funds to advance its pipeline of new crop protection products designed to increase the resilience and security of the food production system by tackling the problem of weed resistance. The investment also advance its portfolio of leads through to the next stage of development and to further expand its prolific high-throughput in vivo screening platforms.
Led by CEO Virginia Corless, moa has developed its own discovery platforms focused on the discovery of a new generation of sustainable herbicides from both natural and synthetic chemistry.
Its three proprietary platforms, GALAXY, TARGET, and SELECT, utilize miniaturized living plants in combination with techniques in genetics, phenotypic analysis and data analytics to screen hundreds of thousands of natural and synthetic chemistries to find those that work differently. In its first two years, the approach has already yielded an order of magnitude increase in the discovery rate of these novel interactions between chemistry and plant biology which have the potential to control weeds in safe new ways.
FinSMEs
31/05/2022