Wild Bio buys F1 Seed to build Britain’s first independent precision-breeding wheat firm

What's the deal? Wild Bioscience (Wild Bio), an Oxford University AgTech spinout, has acquired F1 Seed, a Suffolk-based independent wheat breeding business. Financial terms were undisclosed. The deal makes Wild Bio a fully integrated, end-to-end UK seed company.

What each company does: Wild Bio, founded in 2021 by Dr Ross Hendron and Steve Kelly, uses evolutionary biology, AI, and gene editing to design higher-yielding, lower-carbon crops. F1 Seed, founded in 2014 by Bill Angus, was built to broaden genetic diversity and protect farmers from widespread crop failure.

Why now? The acquisition follows Wild Bio’s €51 million Series A, raised to expand R&D and turn early field successes into market-ready seed varieties. In total, Wild Bio has raised €65.8 million ($75 million) from backers including The Ellison Institute of Technology, Oxford Science EnterprisesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Braavos Capital, and the University of Oxford.

What's the endgame? By pairing breeding with gene editing, Wild Bio aims to design wheat traits that growers need. Its platform analyses plant evolution to guide precision breeding — producing changes that conventional methods could achieve only over prohibitively long periods.

Why it matters: Britain’s wheat is its largest arable crop, generating roughly £3 billion in a typical year. Yet the genetics have long been dominated by subsidiaries of foreign multinationals, narrowing the UK’s wheat pool and leaving more than 50% of domestic varieties vulnerable to yellow rust, a destructive fungal disease.

What they said: “Wheat is Britain’s biggest crop and feeds a fifth of humanity. But on a changing planet, growing it is only getting harder,” said Hendron. He added that combining F1 Seed’s strengths with Wild Bio’s platform gives the company “the full stack of capabilities we need to develop the varieties that will bend the yield curve upwards again.”

The signal: The deal marks a bid to rebuild independent, domestic wheat breeding in the UK, countering decades of consolidation under foreign multinationals and betting that gene editing can accelerate crop resilience against drought, heat, and disease.

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Image credit: Ivan Radic