Amatera

Amatera (also referenced as Amatera Biosciences) is a Paris-based plant biotechnology company that applies cell culture, high-throughput automation and machine learning to accelerate the development of new crop genetics. Its premise is that conventional breeding of perennial crops takes more than 20 years, and that the main bottleneck is selection: breeders must grow and screen thousands of plants to find the few carrying desired genetic markers. Amatera moves that screening step from the greenhouse to the cell, isolating individual cells, growing them in culture at lab scale, sequencing and screening them, and regenerating into whole plants only the cell lines identified as promising.

The company originally focused on generating perennial crop varieties in-house by inducing spontaneous genetic variation with physical and chemical approaches, producing large libraries of non-GMO cell lines. The same automated screening can be applied to cell lines created by other methods, including gene editing, mutation breeding and doubled haploid production. Amatera states that cell-stage screening is used where genetic markers are predictive of whole-plant performance, citing caffeine biosynthesis genes as an example where genetic variability at the gene level modulates caffeine levels in the plant. Its commercial platform is marketed as CellTera.

In-house product programs target coffee and wine grapes: a "Robustica" coffee combining Robusta resilience with Arabica cup quality, a naturally caffeine-free Arabica that would avoid chemical decaffeination, and Merlot grapevines resistant to downy mildew (with work also reported on black rot resistance). Candidates from cell-culture screening for coffee and wine grapes were reported to be in nurseries as of March 2026. The company is also extending its platform to annual vegetable and row crops through partnerships with seed companies.

Founding story

Amatera was started by Omar Dekkiche, described as an engineer and former M&A banker on a second deep-tech venture, and Lucie Kriegshauser, a plant biologist trained at CNRS and then INRAE. The two met during an Entrepreneur First program and cofounded the company in 2022, initially aiming to create the first naturally decaffeinated Coffea arabica.

Business model

Two-track model: for perennial crops, Amatera develops and tests varieties in-house and plans to license them; for annual crops, it offers its screening and automation technology as a platform that seed companies, agrifood firms and research institutes can incorporate into their own breeding pipelines, including for edited, mutated and doubled haploid lines.

Anticipated licensing of in-house-developed perennial varieties plus technology-platform arrangements and partnerships with seed and agrifood companies; no revenue figures disclosed in the sources.

Traction

Reported 30 employees; nursery-stage candidates for Robustica and caffeine-free Arabica coffee and mildew-resistant grapevines; a signed partnership in wine grapes; research collaborations with the University of Costa Rica, CIRAD and INRAE IPS2; $7M seed round raised in March 2026.

Latest developments

In March 2026 Amatera announced a €6 million ($6.97–7.0 million) seed round co-led by Demea Sustainable Investment and Oyster Bay Venture Capital with existing investors PINC, Mudcake and Exceptional Ventures. Proceeds are earmarked for expanding engineering and scientific teams, industrializing the robotics and AI platform, and extending from perennials into annual vegetable and row crops.