Deep Science Ventures (DSV), a UK-based deeptech venture creator, and Renaissance Philanthropy, a nonprofit fueling a 21st century renaissance by increasing the ambition of philanthropists, scientists, and innovators, today announce a venture creation project designed for systemic intervention in crop resilience.
The project, part of DSV and Renaissance Philanthropy’s existing partnership to form the Climate Emergencies Resilience Lab (CERL), marks a significant step in driving a new category of agricultural technology: priming resilience in crops. Moving beyond traditional genetic modification, the initiative establishes a high-ambition roadmap for tackling the economic threat of climate-induced crop failures through the creation of commercially viable, deep-tech spin-outs.
The urgency is clear. By 2050, climate-driven agricultural collapse and malnutrition could cost the world $1.8 trillion and 887 million years of healthy human life. This is not a distant projection; recent droughts and heatwaves have already destroyed up to 50% of harvests across California, Southeast Brazil, and the Horn of Africa, while pre-harvest sprouting alone costs more than $1 billion annually.
However, the dominant approach- engineering crops for permanent genetic resilience- is reaching its limits. Hardwiring heat tolerance into a plant’s DNA often results in a “yield penalty” during normal years, while novel traits can take 10+ years to get to market. As climate extremes grow less predictable, these static, time-consuming solutions are becoming increasingly unviable for global food security.
There is a better paradigm. A convergence of technology breakthroughs mean that it is becoming possible to tune resilience in alignment with climate risks. The DSV and Renaissance Philanthropy partnership has identified three high-growth technical pillars ready for venture creation and institutional backing:
Forecasted priming to enhance stress pathways and orchestrate developmental processes, combining short-term weather accuracy with biologicals such as RNA or peptides to tune crops in real time.
Environment-responsive protectants and field-robust symbiotic microbes, enabling stress tolerance to be outsourced and reliably activated under specific conditions.
Foundational breeding tools to rapidly expand the available palette of resilience traits, for example by engineering wild relatives or donor plants to circumvent barriers including crossing, linkage drag and epistasis.
“We are mapping the white space where science meets commercial markets,” said Dom Falcao, Co-Founding Director at Deep Science Ventures. “This is about creating a de-risked pathway that transforms plant science into investment-ready companies. We are providing the systematic architecture to turn primed resilience into a dominant market category.”
“Renaissance Philanthropy was built to advance entire fields,” said Joshua Elliott, Chief Scientist at Renaissance Philanthropy. “By furthering our partnership with DSV, we are enabling visionary philanthropic capital to act as a bridge for innovations that are too complex for traditional early-stage funding but too critical to ignore. The next generation of agricultural tech must exist in the field, protecting livelihoods and preventing the social unrest caused by food insecurity. We look forward to partnering with collaborators including scientists, funders and other experts to realise our goals and encourage them to reach out to us.”
“Extreme climate variation and the increased spread of plant pests and pathogens are making farming less predictable and more costly,” said Yannick Wurm, of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) and Professor of Evolutionary Genomics at Queen Mary University of London. “There is no one-size-fits-all solution. This initiative strengthens our ability to intentionally harness what nature has already evolved, while advancing reversible interventions that can make resilience-on-demand a reality for growers.”
The partners seek to identify and embed specialised talent to lead technical and commercial scoping. These individuals will define a specific market or environmental need and work backward to build the necessary field-ready data packages. Distinct from traditional models, this approach does not rely on an initial laboratory breakthrough or chance discovery. By intentionally engineering the R&D, regulatory, and IP strategies toward a predetermined outcome, the initiative ensures that innovation is targeted where it can achieve the greatest global economic and nutritional impact.
