Veridi's EIC Accelerator Counts the Worms That Rate Your Soil

Soil quality is measured by its nematodes, microscopic worms whose species composition tells you about fertility, disease and carbon cycling. Identifying them by species is skilled microscope work that, as Veridi puts it, has historically been limited to a small number of specialists. The company, based in The Hague, automates it: a robotic microscope scans the sample, machine learning identifies the organisms, and the result comes back as advice. Its system is called NEMASCOPE.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, VERIDI, at its October 2024 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,497,250 from June 2025 to May 2027, to optimise the hardware and software, expand the species database, validate the system, run customer pilots and extend it to fungi and insects. The project's case is policy and economics: soil holds more than a quarter of the world's biological diversity, more than 60% of European soils are degraded, and that costs Europe over €50 billion a year.

What Wageningen checked

The strongest fact in the company's record is a number it reports from a validation with Wageningen Plant Research. In collaboration with Wageningen Plant Research, Veridi validated NEMASCOPE at 96% accuracy in identifying a key root-knot nematode species, it announced on 3 April 2026 alongside recognition in Bayer LifeHub's Golden Ticket programme. In February 2026 it reported that the system had passed a field trial with Wageningen University and Research.

That is one species, not the whole diagnostic panel, and the broader claims, more than 90% accuracy and about half the cost of manual analysis, are the company's own. The next step named in the EIC project is automating nematode-based indices, the frameworks that turn species counts into a soil health score, which is where the biodiversity monitoring market actually is.

A launch in front of the people who would know

Veridi launched NEMASCOPE at ESN2026, the European Society of Nematology conference, which it sponsored, presenting the field trial data with Wageningen Plant Research to an audience of nematologists, regulators and agrochemical companies. Describing it as "the first and only validated AI-powered high-throughput microscopy system capable of diagnosing nematodes at species level" in front of that audience is a strong claim made in a place where it could be contradicted.

The rest of 2026 was commercial groundwork rather than sales: a panel at CROP IB, the Forum for Latin Impact Investors in Mexico, the first European Mission Soil Investment Forum in Brussels, and two weeks with the US nematology community in Baltimore and Florida. No customer, contract or revenue figure has been published, and CORDIS shows no periodic report.

1. Species-level identification by machineValidated96% with Wageningen Plant Research on one species.
2. Product on the marketLaunchedNEMASCOPE launched at ESN2026, June 2026.
3. Customer pilotsNot reportedNamed in the project objective; none announced.
4. Fungi and insect analysisNot started publiclyListed as the scale-up step in the project.

A small company with a grant and angels

Veridi's disclosed funding is modest: accelerator and ecosystem backing from StartLife and EIT Food, angel investment including from its own chief scientific officer, and the €2.5 million EIC grant, which The Hague's city newsroom described as money to hire engineers and scientists and scale the platform. The award was blended finance and no EIC Fund equity has been announced. The company's accounts were not obtained for this article.

A market an EU law is about to create

The timing is the point. The EU Soil Monitoring Law is expected to require standardised soil health assessment from 2028, the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 and the global biodiversity agreement both demand measurement, and nobody can measure soil biodiversity at scale today because the work is manual. The project's biodiversity policy tracker is at 100%, and Veridi has been positioning in exactly the rooms where the rules and the money meet, including the Commission's own Mission Soil investment forum.