A U.S.-based agricultural biotech startup named Robigo is engineering naturally occurring soil microbes to carry precise genetic instructions that disable the specific genes responsible for crop disease, without harming pollinators, beneficial soil organisms, or human consumers. The World Economic Forum named Robigo a Technology Pioneer in February 2026 as part of its annual recognition of startups developing technologies with measurable social and environmental impact, such as engineered living biopesticides.
Robigo’s founder and chief executive officer, Dr. Andee Wallace, built the company around a technology called RNA interference, known as RNAi, a natural cellular mechanism that living organisms already use to switch specific genes on or off at the molecular level.
By engineering soil microbes to carry tailored RNAi molecules targeting only the genes of a particular pathogen, Robigo produces what Wallace calls a “living biopesticide,” a microbe that delivers its genetic payload directly to the disease organism and leaves the surrounding ecosystem intact.
Chemical pesticides have run for 70 years without a targeted alternative
Chemical pesticides have dominated global agriculture for seven decades, and the scale of their collateral damage has accumulated accordingly: they kill beneficial soil microbes alongside harmful pathogens, reduce pollinator populations, degrade soil quality over successive seasons, and leave residues that research institutions including the World Health Organization have linked to chronic health risks in farmworkers and consumers, according to environmental science literature reviewed by the World Economic Forum’s agri-tech program.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that plant diseases cause between 20% and 40% of global crop losses annually, and that newly emerging pathogens increasingly arrive faster than chemical treatments can be developed or approved, leaving growers in high-value specialty crop sectors with no effective commercial option when a new disease strain appears in their fields; this structural gap is precisely the market Robigo targets with its living biopesticide approach.
A single application, a 90% recovery rate, and a machine learning layer
Fusarium wilt, a fungal infection caused by the Fusarium oxysporum pathogen, destroys lettuces, strawberries, and bananas and currently lacks any effective chemical treatment, making it a direct test of Robigo’s technology under conditions where chemical alternatives do not exist at all, rather than where they exist but underperform.
In field trials, farmers who applied Robigo’s treatment once at the start of the growing season moved from losing entire fields to recovering more than 90% of their lettuce harvest, according to Wallace’s statements published by the World Economic Forum in February 2026, though the company has not yet released peer-reviewed trial data and regulatory approval processes in the United States and other markets remain ongoing.
Robigo applies machine learning (algorithms that analyze large datasets to identify patterns and improve predictions) and data science to design its RNAi molecules, screening each molecular candidate for two properties simultaneously: maximum efficacy against the target pathogen and minimum risk to every other organism in the local ecosystem, a design requirement that Wallace describes as the non-negotiable standard separating a living biopesticide from a more targeted but still broad-spectrum chemical product.
Funding growth and the barriers that investment alone cannot remove
Robigo closed a US$10 million seed round in February 2023, surpassing its original US$8 million target, and in January 2025, the startup won the THRIVE Global X Scale-Up Program with additional investment from SVG Ventures, bringing total disclosed funding to above US$11 million.
Meanwhile, the global RNAi pesticides market reached US$1.33 billion in 2024, and IMARC Group projects it will grow at 11.4% annually to reach US$3.88 billion by 2033, driven by regulatory restrictions on chemical pesticides in the European Union and rising consumer demand for residue-free produce across North American and Asian markets.
The living biopesticide category still faces three obstacles that funding and field results alone cannot resolve: public acceptance of gene-edited microbes applied to food crops, regulatory timelines that can stretch past five years in the United States and Europe, and production costs that remain higher than conventional chemical treatments for the growers least able to absorb them, meaning that the 90% Fusarium recovery rate Wallace cites represents a genuine technological result but not yet a commercially available solution for the majority of the world’s specialty crop farmers.