About genes, crops and gigabytes of data
The daffodils you pick out in the flower shop, the cherry tomatoes you grab in the supermarket, the cotton T-shirt you put on today: they all started life in a field. But before that, they were selected as seeds in a laboratory based on data – a lot of data. Bart Verstrynge, CEO and founder of Breed Bio, sees the world through that lens. From Hasselt, he is building a software platform that helps plant breeders across five continents select which plants will form the next generation more quickly, more precisely and more efficiently. With innovative starter support and a scale-ready pathway from Flanders Innovation & Entrepreneurship (VLAIO), in less than two years Breed Bio has grown into a scale-up with customers in every time zone – from Africa to the Americas ...
Three visits to San Diego
Anyone directly or indirectly involved in plant and animal genetics travels to San Diego every January for the ‘Plant and Animal Genome Conference’– the barometer for the sector. Breed Bio has now attended three times, and those three visits tell the company’s story better than any press release.
“The first time, we were there with three banners and a very basic stand,” Bart Verstrynge recalls. “The second time, we had a professional stand, a well-designed brochure and a clear story. The third time, our stand was the place everyone came to and we were constantly giving demos, answering questions and scheduling follow-up meetings.”
That’s no accident, but the natural result of a product that works, a market that is ready and a team that maintains its focus.
One of the oldest problems in the world
Bart has a background in computer science and has always been drawn to problems where data makes the difference. He found his calling in agrogenetics, the genetic analysis of crops to enable more targeted breeding selection.
Bart: “Agriculture is one of the oldest human activities. Yet only in the past twenty years has it truly become a data-driven business: breeders measure how plants behave under heat, drought or specific light intensities. They map the entire genome of a plant – and based on that genetic data, they predict which offspring will carry the desired traits, even before a single seed is planted.”
“I like to compare it to what has long been happening in the medical world. In humans, we speak of a ‘polygenic risk score’: based on a person’s full genetic profile, you make predictions about susceptibility to certain diseases. We do exactly the same, but for plants.”
Genetic biomarkers serve as signposts in this process. Breeders know exactly which traits they want, they understand the correlations and they want to be able to retrieve that information quickly, reliably and at scale. Bart: “But that is precisely where the sector still struggles today. The software used by breeding companies is often outdated or tied to specific suppliers: you buy hardware and receive the associated software, without the tools needed for the research phase. It is hardly suitable for a laboratory that has to process hundreds or thousands of samples day in, day out.”
Breed Bio fills that gap. The platform functions as the operating system of a breeding laboratory: from the sample request to the selection report that tells the breeder which plants to take into the next breeding phase. Hardware-independent, infinitely scalable and built around the specific logic of a breeding programme. “The people in those labs simply deserve a scalable platform that meets the standards you would expect in 2026,” says Bart.
Five Fs
Anyone thinking about robust, climate-resilient crops should look beyond their daily portion of fruit and vegetables: soy and other feed crops (where protein content and composition are crucial), cotton plants for textiles (where yield per square metre must be maximised), cut flowers for florists and even alternative fuels to diesel and petrol all originate in the field. “Food, feed, fibre, flower and fuel,” Bart alliteratively summarises his broad target group. “For us, it’s all the same. All over the world there are breeding programmes in need of genetic selection. And our software works for all these markets at once: Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Sweden, Australia, the United States, South Africa, India. To make that possible, your product has to be extremely strong. That is the basic condition; that is where our focus lies.”
With Breed Bio, we are supporting a Flemish scale-up that uses data and artificial intelligence to address a global problem more efficiently. The scale-up programme helped translate that technological innovation into international commercial impact.
Two years building, now scaling
Breed Bio was founded in 2024. Bart built his entrepreneurial experience at previous tech scale-ups, including Lighthouse, UgenTec and Secury360. Bart: “I didn’t jump straight into it right out of university; I grew into it, through experience and experimentation.”
That considered approach also defines how Breed Bio was built. The first two years were entirely devoted to product development and anchoring the product-market fit, together with co-founder Thomas Beuls. “We first wanted to understand exactly what we wanted to build: the end-to-end process from request to selection report. We now have that.” Customers are now approaching Breed Bio proactively and their feedback is telling, Bart stresses: “‘We’ve worked on many software projects, but this is the best we’ve seen in the past five years,’ they say, quite literally.” This is the most important and reassuring signal. “You can design the most brilliant processes and still sell nothing. No one gives you a high five for a great process. The product has to be top-notch, otherwise no one will buy it.”
From 2026 onwards, the next step is on the agenda with the help of the scale-ready grant: commercial and operational scaling. With a team of ten today and the ambition to double that within two years, the challenge is clear: marketing, commercial teams, project management, customer success management and technical support. “We are now building a company that can stand on its own,” says Bart. “Because if we increase the number of customers, we need a solid structure.”
At Breed Bio, it often felt as though you were standing beside a moving train: a great deal of energy, a clear sense of direction. My role was mainly to help channel that speed: setting focus, sharpening long-term planning and mapping out the next steps, in order to translate their ambition to build into project planning and execution.
Investing in the right things at the right time
It was precisely at those turning points that VLAIO entered the picture. With innovative starter support, Breed Bio developed the first concrete application, now actively used by several customers. The company then secured a scale-ready grant to prepare the next phase.
Bart is clear about what that support brought him, distinguishing between three aspects. First, the funding itself: “It allows you to invest in things you would otherwise do much more slowly. It creates a significant acceleration.” Second, the application process: “It forces you to pause – to set aside day-to-day firefighting and really think about the longer term. Working in work packages and writing out your plan is a valuable exercise in itself, whether you obtain the grant or not.” Third, the guidance: “That was unexpected. I thought: government, submit an application, wait. But with VLAIO business advisers Mieke Martens and Anke Albregts, it’s quite different. It’s as if they want it just as much as we do. They are genuinely on our side.”
FIT, Flanders Investment & Trade, also contributed to the company’s international ambitions, including participation in trade fairs abroad – a relationship that, according to Bart, still has room to grow.
