A crop biotechnology venture spun out from Rothamsted Research and the University of Oxford has secured £2.5 million in strategic investment from The Mosaic Company to advance a new class of precision crop biostimulants.
The investment is part of SugaROx’s ongoing Series A fundraising round and will support expanded international field trials, regulatory activities, commercial scale-up of the company’s product platform, and further development of its flagship biostimulant based on trehalose-6-phosphate, or T6P.
T6P is a naturally occurring signalling molecule that regulates how plants allocate and use carbon. SugaROx has developed proprietary delivery technologies that allow these highly polar biomolecules to be applied externally using conventional agricultural spray systems.
The platform emerged from collaborative research in plant metabolism, signalling biology, and synthetic chemistry at Rothamsted Research and the University of Oxford. The company’s lead products are designed to improve crop yield, resilience, and nutrient use efficiency by modulating key intracellular metabolic pathways, according to a press release.
Dr. Cara Griffiths, Senior Research Scientist at Rothamsted Research, co-founder, and Chief Scientific Officer of SugaROx, has played a leading role in translating the underlying biology into scalable agricultural technologies.
“One of the major challenges in this field has been translating highly complex plant signalling biology into technologies that can function consistently under real agricultural conditions,” Griffiths said. “Our work has focused on bridging fundamental discovery science with practical delivery systems that can ultimately support more productive and resilient cropping systems.”
Mosaic’s investment follows an earlier seed-stage investment that supported the scale-up of T6P production and initial international field validation activities.
SugaROx will now expand its field evaluation programmes across multiple crops and environments as it prepares for planned commercial launches in the UK, Europe, and North America between 2027 and 2030.
The work reflects Rothamsted Research’s continued focus on translational science and the development of innovative technologies to address long-term challenges in agricultural productivity and sustainability.
