A Toronto startup believes it has found a way to outmaneuver crop pests in an evolutionary arms race farmers are rapidly losing. Molagri announced Monday it raised $5.8 million across two funding rounds to develop pesticides that can be reconfigured on the fly as insects evolve resistance.
The financing combines a recent $5.2 million seed round led by Convective Capital with an earlier pre-seed of roughly $600,000 led by Julian Capital. Y Combinator, Superorganism, Robinhood Ventures and Paul Graham joined a syndicate of angels backing the company, which emerged from Y Combinator's accelerator program.
At the heart of Molagri's pitch is a technical gambit borrowed from virology: engineered viral shells that deliver genetic instructions to pests without actually infecting them. These virus-like particles, or VLPs, latch onto species-specific receptors in an insect's gut. Once inside, they deploy mRNA payloads that hijack the pest's own cellular machinery to manufacture a toxin fatal only to that species. Honeybees and other pollinators, lacking the targeted receptor, pass through unharmed.
The approach is modular by design. When a pest population develops resistance to one toxin, Molagri can swap in a different payload or retarget a new receptor without overhauling the entire delivery system. Whether regulators will permit such iterative updates to approved crop-protection products remains an open question. No clear precedent exists, and the company acknowledged it is still mapping that pathway.
Molagri's founders bring credentials from an unexpected corner of biology. CEO Zaky Hassan studied biochemistry at the University of Toronto and trained as a viral structural biologist. His cofounder and chief scientific officer, Min Jin, contributed to research on high-resolution coronavirus spike protein structures during the pandemic, work published in Nature Communications. The company claims Jin holds a world-record resolution for a coronavirus spike structure cataloged in the Protein Data Bank, though multiple labs have since published similarly detailed structures.
That viral expertise now targets agricultural pests. The startup is focusing initially on tree nuts and tree fruits—almonds, pistachios, apples, pears—with the navel orangeworm and codling moth as early test cases. Production will rely on yeast fermentation, a relatively familiar biotech manufacturing route.
Molagri's four-person team plans to double in size following the funding. Job postings on LinkedIn show openings for scientists in synthetic virology, insect biology and VLP production, with salaries ranging from C$85,000 to C$160,000 plus equity. The company has moved into a new Toronto lab equipped for biomanufacturing and tissue culture work, and filed a provisional patent covering its VLP delivery system.
So far, Molagri has secured one letter of intent from a grower but has not disclosed field efficacy data or named customers publicly. Hassan said the funds will accelerate research, expand lab operations and push the first VLPs into testing. "We're focused on building," he told BetaKit. "Right now we're just nonstop."
The urgency is grounded in economics. Farmers globally spend an estimated $18 billion annually on insecticides, a slice of an $80 billion pesticide market increasingly undermined by resistance. "Pesticide resistance is a slow-moving disaster for global food security," said Bill Clerico, managing partner at Convective Capital.
Molagri enters a crowded but often precarious field of crop-protection biotechs. Vestaron raised over $20 million for peptide-based bioinsecticides before selling its R&D assets to Suterra. GreenLight Biosciences has advanced work on RNA-interference herbicides. Provivi has pursued pheromone-based mating disruption across multiple funding rounds, while Oxitec has deployed genetically modified mosquitoes under experimental EPA permits.
Whether Molagri's modular pest-control platform can navigate the regulatory gauntlet and prove itself in commercial agriculture remains to be seen. For now, the company is betting that the ability to reprogram its pesticides faster than insects can adapt will prove decisive in a contest farmers have been losing for decades.
