The numbers arrived with bureaucratic plainness: U.S. beekeepers lost an estimated 55.6 percent of their colonies in the 2024-2025 season, according to preliminary survey data. The highest recorded loss since monitoring began in 2010. Not a close call—a new record by a considerable margin.
For anyone who follows agriculture, the implications don't require much interpretation. About three-quarters of global food crops depend at least partly on pollinators, per FAO figures. Meanwhile, commercial growers still face the ancient calculus of pest control: fail to act, and you lose the harvest to beetles or borers. Act with conventional chemistry, and you risk collateral damage that compounds the pollinator crisis. It's the kind of bind that usually doesn't resolve itself.
Unless, as a small group of biochemists in Toronto would have it, you can design a molecule selective enough to kill only what you're targeting.
A Bet on Precision at the Molecular Level
That's the wager behind Molagri, a four-person startup that recently emerged from Y Combinator's Summer 2026 accelerator batch. Founders Zaky Hassan and Min Jin are protein biochemists by training, both with doctoral work at the University of Toronto focused on viral structural biology. Their CVs list publications in Nature Communications and Nature Microbiology—credentials that matter in a field where molecular design isn't metaphorical.
The pitch is deceptively straightforward: engineer biopesticides that bind to proteins found only in pest species. If the target protein doesn't exist in bees, beneficial insects, or humans, the pesticide shouldn't harm them. In theory. The harder part, Hassan and Jin argue, is modeling how resistance will develop and staying ahead of it—a cat-and-mouse game that has bedeviled agrochemical giants for decades.
Whether a four-person operation can pull this off is, of course, an open question. But they're entering a market that has started moving fast enough to make such long-odds bets look less quixotic than they might have a decade ago.
The Biopesticides Market Finds Its Footing
Not long ago, biological pest control occupied a niche corner of agriculture—something for organic operations and specialty crops, but hardly a threat to the synthetic chemistry incumbents. That's changed. Multiple research firms now peg the global biopesticides market somewhere between $8.4 billion and $9.91 billion in 2025, with projections climbing to a range of $22.9 billion to $40.6 billion by the early 2030s, depending on which analyst you believe and how they define the category.
The spread in those estimates tells you something about a market still finding its shape. But even conservative growth rates—call it 10 to 11 percent annually—would mean the sector more than doubles within a decade. And some regions are moving considerably faster.
Brazil has become an unlikely proving ground. The country approved 912 pesticide registrations in 2025, including 162 biological products, according to industry publication Agribrasilis citing January 2026 government data. Embrapa, Brazil's agricultural research agency, has noted that the domestic biopesticides market expanded at roughly 45 percent annually over a five-year stretch, with biological controls deployed across some 70 million hectares by 2022. Regulatory timelines there run about two years for biologicals—a sharp contrast to the longer approval cycles that still prevail in Europe.
The incumbent agrochemical firms have noticed. Syngenta opened a 22,000-square-meter biologicals production facility in early 2025 and has publicly set a target of $1 billion in biologicals revenue by 2028. Corteva's recent filings mention volume growth in biologicals, though specific revenue breakouts remain vague. These are companies with decades of infrastructure built around synthetic chemistry, now scrambling to retool for a market they once dismissed.
Beyond Microbes: The Molecular Turn
Molagri's approach sits within what some industry watchers are starting to call molecular biopesticides—a loose category that includes RNA interference, recombinant proteins, and engineered peptides. The distinction matters. Traditional biopesticides often rely on whole microorganisms: Bacillus thuringiensis spores, for instance, or entomopathogenic fungi that colonize and kill pests. Those work, but they're imprecise. Environmental conditions affect them. Resistance can develop. And despite the "bio" label, they're not always harmless to non-targets. A 2024 study in Environmental Science and Pollution Research documented measurable mortality effects on bees exposed to certain microbial biopesticide mixtures under laboratory conditions—a reminder that biological doesn't automatically mean benign.
Molecular approaches aim for mechanism-based precision instead. You're not deploying an organism with its own messy life cycle. You're delivering a designed molecule that disrupts a specific biochemical target. If the target exists only in pest species, everything else should, in principle, remain unaffected.
The first commercial validation for this approach arrived in December 2023—
(The draft ends here, mid-thought, which is perhaps fitting for a company and a technology still very much in motion. Whether Molagri's molecular designs can deliver on their promise remains an empirical question, one that will be answered in greenhouses and fields, not pitch decks. But with pollinator losses hitting historic highs and a global food system that can't afford to lose either pest control or pollinators, the urgency for better answers has rarely been clearer.)
