Spectra Bio

Re-igniting herbicide discovery by tracking plants' chemical signalling to detect efficacy in hours, not days.

The Challenge

Herbicide resistance and stricter regulations are pulling legacy chemistries off the $39B global market, yet no new active ingredient has reached market in 30+ years. Slow, costly, and outdated screening methods bottleneck a R&D pipeline that takes over $300M and 12 years to bring an single new ingredient to market.

The Opportunity

We solve slow, low-information screening for agrochemical companies by capturing a plant’s real-time chemical response to herbicide application, unlocking a new modality of data that streamlines the entire discovery pipeline. Our signals detect chemical action within hours insteading of days, revealing not just whether a compound works, but how.

The team

Selin Olenik

Co-Founder

The Venture

Business Model

Our strategy is to start earning revenue through paid trials with large multinationals, since their substantial R&D budgets and high volume pipelines make them early adopters. As we grow, our revenue model will follow a milestone-based licensing model: receiving milestone payments as compounds progress through development, then royalties on commercial sale.

Competition

Our competitors use imaging-based platforms for high-throughput phenotyping. Though automated, they rely on slow visual stress markers and require expensive, bulky infrastructure for herbicide screening. Our platform is low-cost, modular, and integrates beneath standard well plates. By measuring biochemical stress markers, we detect herbicide action days ahead of imaging rivals.

Traction

Tthree peer-reviewed publications validate our sensing technology. Our prototype platform monitors 100+ plants simultaneously and detected distinct chemical signatures for two herbicides within five hours, collapsing efficacy and mode-of-action into one experiment. We’ve engaged 25 companies, including active talks with a top-five agrochemical company, plus £80k in UKRI IAA funding.

Spectra Bio

The Challenge

The Opportunity

The team

Stage

Programme

Industry / Sector

Cohort

The Venture

Business Model

Competition

Traction

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