Amatera Claims Cell-Stage Screening Cuts Breeding Costs Fivefold

Amatera, a plant breeding technology startup founded in 2022, claims its high-throughput cell screening platform can cut breeding costs by at least a factor of five and halve development time — figures that are still projections, not measured results.

Cofounded by CEO Omar Dekkiche and CTO Lucie Kriegshauser, PhD, the company originally focused on perennial crops: naturally caffeine-free coffee, a Robusta variety called Robustica designed to taste like Arabica, and grapes resistant to downy and powdery mildew. Its method induces spontaneous genetic variation through physical and chemical approaches, creating a library of non-GMO cell lines that are sequenced and screened. The same automated screening can also handle cell lines made through gene editing.

The company's pitch is simple: screen at the cell culture stage, before spending money turning thousands of cells into plants.

"Today, the standard approach is to take these cells, first turn them into plants, and then do genotyping to see what you have," Dekkiche told AgFunderNews at the World Agri-Tech event in London. "We are completely changing this by isolating all the cells, one from the other, to grow them in plant cell culture at a lab scale, and then we identify the cell lines of interest and only regenerate those into plants."

He added: "This saves a ton of money and time. Instead of regenerating all the cells into plants and then screening the plants, we have removed the screening bottleneck."

How much does the platform actually save?

Not even Amatera knows yet, by its own admission. Dekkiche said the company is "currently creating data from real data from the lab" on savings, and expects "at least five times the cost saving and two times the time saving" versus conventional methods. Expectation, in this case, precedes evidence.

The barrier to entry, Dekkiche argued, is expertise. Cell-stage screening requires deep cell biology knowledge plus robotics and automation, because no manual workforce can handle single cells. Amatera has patented a pipeline it says can microculture individual plant cells in isolation from one another.

Which traits can be screened in a dish?

The platform has clear limits, and Dekkiche named them. Screening works where a genetic marker exists — where a known gene must be switched to produce a new function. Caffeine production, for example, is detectable because cells show the metabolism to produce it. Drought tolerance and yield are another matter.

"For drought or yield resistance, today we don't have a clear screening that will enable us at a cellular level to do so, so we don't promise that," Dekkiche said. The company is developing screening methods for marker-free traits, but that work is ongoing.

A cell in culture also faces none of the field pressures — soil, microbes, weather — that determine commercial performance. Promising candidates still must be regenerated into whole plants and tested in nurseries and fields, stages where costs return.

Where do the crop programs stand?

Coffee remains the anchor program. On Robustica, Amatera has identified new genes involved in quality and is validating them; Dekkiche conceded it "will take some time before reaching the market." On caffeine-free coffee, the company has found new genes it considers more suitable than those already known, beyond the genes previously identified in the field.

In grapes, the target is resistance to downy and powdery mildew, which Dekkiche called the major problem for vineyards in Europe at least.

What comes next?

Two moves are pending. Amatera is moving toward annual staple crops and partnerships with seed companies; Dekkiche said no partnerships have been announced, but agreements "will come in the coming months." The company raised a seed round earlier this year to industrialize the platform — combining cell biology, robotics, machine learning and AI into one end-to-end device that runs plant cell regeneration workflows autonomously. In June, it also secured a place on the EU-backed EIC Accelerator program to speed that build-out.

Until lab data confirms the fivefold cost claim and a partnership lands, Amatera's case rests on projections — a common position for seed-stage breeding platforms, but one buyers and seed companies will want measured results to back.