Ensemo: EIC Accelerator Bet on Microbes Injected Into Seeds

Soybeans can feed themselves nitrogen from the air, but only if the right bacteria reach their roots, and in most European fields those bacteria have to be added to the seed by the farmer shortly before sowing. Coated onto the outside of the seed, they dry out or rub off. Ensemo, a 2021 spin-off of the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, does it differently: its machine cuts each seed open, injects a drop of microbes and seals the cut again, so the seed can be sold pre-inoculated.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, SeedJection, at its 1 October 2025 cut-off for blended finance. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,499,999 under a grant agreement signed on 28 May 2026, for a project running from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2028. Advantage Austria reported the award in March 2026 as €2.4 million, a figure that does not match the CORDIS amount. The size of any equity investment by the EIC Fund is not public.

Cut, inject, seal

The method comes out of more than two decades of plant and microbe research at AIT in Tulln, according to the FFG and Advantage Austria. In 2021 the founders described a cut of about 0.25 millimetres into each kernel, through which the microbes are placed before the seed is closed, to futurezone. By December 2024 the process had cameras checking each seed's orientation and a biodegradable adhesive to reseal it, per a second futurezone report, and a farmer flyer from Ensemo describes the seal as a biopolymer.

The first application is soybean seed carrying rhizobia, the bacteria that form root nodules and fix nitrogen. The company website says it injects about 0.8 microlitres per seed, that rhizobia survive about 240 days inside soybean seed, and that pre-inoculated seed keeps for up to six months. The established alternative is a coating on the seed surface, which the CORDIS summary says often gives low microbial survival. The microbes themselves are not new: Birgit Mitter told futurezone in 2021 that only natural bacteria from the field are used, without genetic modification.

Throughput was the obstacle the founders named first. Their lab demonstrator handled 30 to 35 seeds a second in 2021, and Nikolaus Pfaffenbichler said then that efficiency required 3,000. Mitter told futurezone in December 2024 that the machine being built had that throughput. The FFG and Advantage Austria now give the machine's capacity as 1.2 tonnes of soybean seed an hour; neither source states how that was measured.

A first customer and a paid add-on

Ensemo leases its machines to seed producers rather than selling them, and the CORDIS summary describes pay-per-use pricing by the volume of treated seed. Mitter said in 2024 that leasing lets the company use the machines for other crops outside the soybean season. According to the December 2024 futurezone report, Saatbau Linz is the first customer and hosts the first machine, after a field trial with treated soybeans on 110 hectares. CORDIS states that Ensemo has its first paying customer and is running field trials with 13 other European seed producers, none of them named.

top agrar reported in February 2025 that pre-inoculated seed of the variety Adelfia would be sold in Germany and Austria from spring 2025 under the name TurboSoy, together with the German soy breeder IG Pflanzenzucht, at an extra cost of €15 to €20 per hectare. Strip trials on 19 German farms showed larger and more active nodules and stronger early growth than conventional inoculation, according to the breeders, with later crop development similar in both variants. The breeders also reported some loss of nitrogen fixation after six months of storage.

What the EIC is paying for

The CORDIS summary sets the goal as taking SeedJection from technology readiness level 6 to 8, adapting it to maize and preparing an expansion to Brazil, with the equity component meant to fund scaling beyond Europe. The project was selected under the challenge "Biotechnology driven low emission food production systems". The EIC counted 923 full applications at that cut-off, and Trending Topics reported 61 companies from 17 countries selected for €467 million in total, with Ensemo the only Austrian one, which the AIT release on derStandard.at and the Lower Austrian government also state.

The European case is in the project's own framing: CORDIS cites the EU's Farm to Fork Strategy as a driver of demand for alternatives to agrochemicals, and rates the project 40% on the climate action and biodiversity trackers.

1. Industrial throughputClaimed1.2 tonnes of soy seed an hour, per the FFG and Advantage Austria; no independent test found.
2. Paying customerReportedSaatbau Linz per futurezone; CORDIS confirms a first paying customer without naming it.
3. Field performanceNot publishedYield gains of 3 to 19% reported, no dataset; German strip trials found similar later growth.
4. TRL 8, maize, BrazilToo earlyThe grant period began on 1 June 2026 and runs until May 2028.

The company behind it

The Austrian company register, published on EVI, records Ensemo GmbH from 12 March 2021 with the two founders as managing directors and a financial year ending 30 June. Annual accounts were filed every year from 2022, most recently on 7 February 2026, but the published entries carry no figures, and no revenue figure appears in the company announcements found. On 18 July 2025 the register entered five corporate shareholders and a capital change; the amount invested is not public. KSV1870 lists the company at Frauentorgasse 72 to 74 in Tulln, while a register entry of 22 October 2026 moved the registered seat to St. Pölten. The company has not announced the reason.

Recognition so far has come from Austria: the Phönix 2025 founders' award in the prototype category, according to the FFG and Advantage Austria, and in June 2026 the overall NÖ Innovationspreis, the Karl Ritter von Ghega prize worth €10,000, per WKO Niederösterreich.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.