Aardaia is a Wageningen-based startup that invents new crops rather than re-engineering the ones the world already farms. Today we draw around 95% of our calories from roughly 30 plant species, out of more than 400,000 on Earth, a narrow base that leaves our food system exposed to climate stress and supply shocks. Aardaia widens it by identifying wild plants that already carry valuable traits, such as drought tolerance or the ability to fix their own nitrogen, and breeding them into viable crops, with no genetic modification or gene editing.
Its first crop is the aardaker, a protein-rich, nitrogen-fixing tuber that needs no synthetic fertiliser and could one day grow up to five times more protein per hectare than any crop farmed today. By building large genomic datasets and predicting which plants will perform before a seed goes in the ground, Aardaia compresses what once took centuries of breeding into a matter of years. Founded in 2025 by Pádraic Flood and Mike Henske, the company is building a more diverse and resilient supply of protein, one new crop at a time.
