Moa Technology, an Oxford Plant Sciences spinout from 2017, closed a £22.2 million Series C on Thursday 23 July co-led by Oxford Science Enterprises and Supernova Invest1. The company has screened more than 900,000 compounds and found over 80 novel herbicide modes of action. Magdalen College Oxford joined the round alongside GrainInnovate, the Agri Investment Fund and Infinity Investment Partners2.
A mode of action is the biochemical route by which a chemical kills a plant. Commercial herbicides have leaned on a handful of those routes for decades, weeds have evolved around them, and growers in Australia and the American Midwest are running short of chemistry that still works. Finding a genuinely new route is rare enough that agrochemical majors have gone years without one.
Moa Technology has built no sales force to carry those 80 routes to a field. Its research partnerships run through four incumbent agrochemical companies that already own the distribution and the regulatory teams: Nufarm, Gowan, Certis Belchim and Corteva Agriscience. Moa's chemistry therefore reaches a field on somebody else's sales ledger. Commercialisation is routed through industry here as it is at Humanoid, though this buys a path to market rather than a factory, and none of it is equity.
University spinout deals fell 33% by count last year. A 2017 vintage closing a Series C with Parkwalk and Oxford University Innovation still on the register is what the surviving tail of that pipeline looks like. Agricultural chemistry runs on decade-long timelines: regulatory approval for a new active ingredient takes years after the science is settled, which is why the survivors are old and the count is falling.
