Bindbridge raises £2.8m seed to design AI molecular glues for crop protection
This article covers Bindbridge, an agtech startup founded in March 2025, which has closed a seed funding round of £2.8m to accelerate development of its BRIDGE computational platform for designing molecular glues for crop protection. The funding will support lab testing and co-development with agrochemical partners to speed discovery of herbicides, insecticides and fungicides that target specific proteins in weeds and pests, addressing rising herbicide resistance and environmental concerns in agriculture.
Bindbridge, a Cambridge-based agtech startup, has closed a seed funding round of £2.8 million to accelerate development of its BRIDGE computational platform for designing molecular glues for crop protection. The cash will support lab testing and co-development work aimed at faster discovery of herbicides, insecticides and fungicides that target specific proteins in weeds and pests — a capability that could help address rising herbicide resistance and environmental concerns in agriculture.
Why it matters
Crop losses to pests and disease remain a major global problem: the UN estimates up to 40% of crops are lost to plant pests each year, while diseases cost the global economy more than $220 billion annually. At the same time, legacy crop-protection chemistry faces growing regulatory and public-health scrutiny, and the industry can take more than a decade and up to $9 billion to bring a new active ingredient to market.
Bindbridge’s approach — using computation to design molecular glues that induce degradation of target proteins inside plant cells — aims to open new chemical space and shorten the discovery timeline. If it works at scale, the technology could provide products that are more selective, potentially reducing off-target effects and persistence in the environment.
Inside the product
The company’s core offering, BRIDGE, combines machine learning and computational chemistry to propose molecules intended to bind a target protein and recruit the plant’s intracellular degradation machinery. These molecular glues are being positioned as a way to develop next-generation crop protection compounds with tailored modes of action against weeds, pests and pathogens.
Bindbridge says it will begin lab testing its first agricultural molecular glues and run co-development projects with agrochemical partners over the next 12 months. The business was founded in March 2025 by Dr George Crane, Dr Alex Campbell and Dr Simeon Spasov. The eight-person team brings together machine-learning engineers, plant biologists, chemists and agricultural specialists alongside venture-building experience.
Who are the investors?
Bindbridge raised £2.8 million in a seed funding round led by Speedinvest with participation from Nucleus Capital. The investors are expected to provide access to climate and deeptech networks as the company moves toward lab validation and partnership work with agrochemical companies.
In the announcement, Namratha Kothapalli, Investor at Speedinvest, said:
We invested because Bindbridge is bringing modern AI to one of the most overlooked and consequential industries on Earth. They’re building the BRIDGE platform for the next generation of crop protection, unlocking entirely new chemical space that the industry simply couldn’t reach before. This is the rare combination of deep science, a massive market, and a team that can build the foundation for the next era of crop protection.
In the announcement, Isabella Fandrych, Partner at Nucleus Capital, said:
Bindbridge is pioneering a new class of molecular glues that can transform how we protect the world’s crops. Addressing herbicide resistance at scale and rebuilding resilience in global food systems are among the highest priorities for human and environmental health and political stability. Their computational platform unlocks billion-dollar markets with a scalable, IP-first model, laying the groundwork for a new era of sustainable agriculture.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, George Crane, Co-founder & CEO at Bindbridge, said:
The agricultural industry faces significant performance and sustainability challenges which is driving demand for more efficient products. Yet there’s no affordable, rational, or systematic way to discover molecular glues that are the foundation for such products. We’re changing that. We’re using the power of AI to rapidly and accurately derive new molecules that can change farming’s future.
Crane’s comments underline the company’s stated aim to combine domain expertise and computation to make discovery more efficient and IP-led, rather than relying on incremental improvements to legacy chemistries.
The bigger picture
Bindbridge’s funding and technical focus reflect a broader move among agtech investors towards computational discovery and biology-enabled tools that promise faster, more targeted product development. The urgency is driven by rising resistance to existing chemistries, tighter environmental regulation and the scale of agricultural losses worldwide.
For the UK and Europe, startups that can shorten R&D cycles and offer more selective crop-protection tools could attract both commercial partnerships with established agrochemical companies and regulatory attention. The deal is an example of continued interest from agtech investors in early-stage teams applying AI and molecular science to long-standing problems in food systems.
This transaction also highlights the intersection of deeptech investment and applied agricultural research in the UK, where university spinouts and small teams are increasingly drawing capital to move lab concepts toward tested products with commercial partners.
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