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With the European vote on NGTs and $720 million raised by Inari alone, agricultural gene editing is entering the industrial phase. Who is in the field, who is missing, and why Italy risks watching from the sidelines.
Zero. That is the number of Italian start-ups in agricultural gene editing among the top-funded globally. While in Italy the debate is still stuck on the word GMO, on the other side of the Atlantic Corteva — the largest American seed company — has taken Inari, a start-up with $720 million in funding and a valuation of $2.17 billion, to court, accusing it of taking patented seeds modified with CRISPR and preparing to market them under its own name. This is the first major patent war in agricultural gene editing: the dispute is not over promises, but over products. By spring 2026, the European Parliament will vote on regulations that will open the door to edited crops in Europe for the first time. The window is opening. The question is whether anyone in Italy is ready to step through it.
The regulatory game, three models, one delay
In the United States, if an edited crop does not contain transgenes and the mutations could occur naturally, no specific authorisation or labelling is required: this is the product-based approach. Following this logic, Corteva’s waxy maize and anti-browning champignon mushroom have come onto the market without restrictions. In the United Kingdom, the Precision Breeding Act of 2023 came into force on 13 November 2025: London is the first major European economy with a specific regulatory framework for agricultural gene editing.
In Europe, the chapter is still open, but a historic turning point is approaching.
On 4 December 2025, after four Council presidencies, the Parliament and Council reached a provisional agreement on New Genomic Techniques. NGT-1 plants — equivalent to those obtainable through conventional breeding, with a maximum of 20 modified nucleotides — will be exempt from GMO legislation: no risk assessment, no authorisation, no labelling on the final product. NGT-2 plants, with more complex modifications, remain subject to the current rules. The ENVI Committee approved the text on 28 January 2026 by 47 votes to 31; the plenary vote is expected between March and April 2026. If passed, the regulation will apply from 2028.
Two important details: plants with herbicide tolerance and insecticide production are excluded from the NGT-1 category. On patents — the most controversial issue — the agreement provides for a mandatory public database and a group of experts composed of representatives from Member States, the European Patent Office and the Community Plant Variety Office. No bans, but transparency and monitoring. Meanwhile, according to AgFunder, 81.9% of capital invested in agricultural gene editing is in the Americas. Europe remains at 5%.
Who’s on the field, the startup map
Inari (Cambridge, Massachusetts) closed a $144 million round in January 2025 — Series G — bringing the total to $720 million and the valuation to $2.17 billion. The SEEDesign platform combines AI and multiple editing to improve soybean, corn and wheat yields while reducing water and nitrogen requirements by up to 40%, according to the company. However, it is involved in a lawsuit with Corteva for alleged patent infringement: a case that touches on the heart of intellectual property in the sector.
Pairwise (Durham, North Carolina), co-founded by the inventors of CRISPR, signed a £25 million joint venture with Corteva in 2024. Between 2024 and 2025, it licensed the Fulcrum platform to three CGIAR centres — IITA for tropical crops, CIMMYT for maize and wheat, and IRRI for rice — with support from the British government and the Gates Foundation, and entered into partnerships with Sun World (pitted cherries) and Enza Zaden (vegetables). The model: license the technology to those who have the market, don’t build a consumer brand.
Tropic Biosciences (Norwich, UK) is working on bananas, coffee and rice using RNA editing. Its anti-browning banana is on TIME’s ‘Best Inventions 2025’ list. Then there are mixed signals: Cibus (San Diego), born from a merger with Calyxt, whose gene-edited oil never found commercial scale, is now focusing on rapeseed. Benson Hill filed for bankruptcy in March 2025 — a warning to those who confuse raised capital with a validated business model.
The dark side
Every powerful technology has its risks. The first is concentration: CRISPR technologies are covered by fundamental patents held by the Broad Institute and the University of California, with exclusive licences granted to a few companies. Corteva holds the CRISPR rights for agriculture. The Corteva vs Inari case is already emblematic. The second is biodiversity: if a few edited super-varieties replace local cultivars, the genetic heritage is impoverished. Editing could also protect endangered varieties, but this requires an explicit commitment that is not currently evident. The third is dependency: patented seeds mean annual purchases tied to the supplier. Some countries — India with ICAR, Brazil with Embrapa — develop varieties in-house to avoid this.
And Italy?
In our country, agricultural gene editing consists of high-quality public research — the TEA grapevine could be the first real test in the field — but almost no start-ups. Zero among the top-funded globally, despite a wine and fruit and vegetable tradition that would have everything to gain. If the NGT regulation becomes law in 2026, the Italian system will have a window of opportunity, but it needs capital, clear regulatory paths and an ecosystem that connects laboratories, seed producers and farmers.
Meanwhile, the toolkit is expanding — base editing, prime editing, epigenome editing — and convergence with artificial intelligence promises to compress variety development times from ten years to three. The molecular scissors are sharp. It remains to be seen who will wield them, for whose benefit, and with what vision of the field to come.
Note to reader: the author is CEO of Beeco and works with investment funds active in agritech, which may have supported or will support some of the startups mentioned in the future.
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