UK-based SugaROx has secured £1million (approx. US$1.355 million) in additional funding following its latest seed round extension.

£400,000 of the strategic investment has been secured from The Mosaic Company, alongside continued backing from existing UK-based angel investors and sustainable growth-focused investment funds the UK Innovation & Science Seed Fund (managed by Future Planet Capital) and Regenerate Ventures, which contributed a further £600,000.

The £1 million extension follows a £2.4 million grant awarded from the UK’s national innovation agency, Innovate UK, to upscale manufacturing of SugaROx’s first active ingredient Trehalose-6-Phosphate (T6P).

SugaROx says its T6P biostimulant boosts the yields and resilience of crops by inhibiting SnRK1, an enzyme that signals energy scarcity in the plant. Safety tests completed in early 2024 confirmed a promising regulatory outlook for the proprietary T6P, and led potential go-to-market partners to request samples for field trials.

SugaROx is working to launch its T6P wheat biostimulant in the UK market in 2027 and in the EU in 2028. This year, the company launched trials in soybean and maize with a view to enter the U.S. and Brazilian markets shortly after.

“In response to increasing demand for product samples, we decided to accelerate our manufacturing timeline, fast-tracking the shift from in-house lab production to a pilot facility,” said Mark Robbins, SugaROx CEO. “The Innovate UK grant and additional investment allows us to do that.”

Explaining the benefits of Mosaic’s investment, Dr. Cara Griffiths, SugaROx’s chief technical officer and co-founder, added: “With Mosaic we gain access to an established network of trial sites for validation of our first product in the U.S. at scale. Mosaic will also provide us with access to TruResponse, a digital platform to visualize field results, which will be extremely valuable for our research.”

SugaROx is a spin-out from Rothamsted Research and the University of Oxford.

Source：newaginternational.com