Nitroduck, a three-person startup in Brno, Czech Republic, has joined Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch with a plan to make "every crop editable." It is building on a duckweed engineering method that won the 2025 iGEM Grand Prize, and it arrives just as Europe rewrites its rules on gene-edited plants.
The timing may be luck or good reading of the calendar. Regulation (EU) 2026/1388 was adopted June 17, 2026, and entered into force July 16, according to EUR-Lex, the EU's official legal database.
What Nitroduck says it does
Its Y Combinator profile calls the company "Monsanto for yummy crops, but without pesticides," a line that is either charming or a little provocative, depending on how one feels about Monsanto. The stated ambitions are specific: coffee that tolerates heat waves, almonds that do not depend on pollinators, and pistachios that can cope with mild winters.
On its website, the company says it has made duckweed "5× faster to engineer." Matej Zámečník is chief executive. Matúš Grieš serves as chief technology officer, and Miroslav Rosputinský is chief science officer. In the material reviewed for this article, Nitroduck has not disclosed any funding.
The iGEM pedigree
The iGEM Brno 2025 team took the Grand Prize at the international synthetic biology competition, along with awards for Best Agriculture Project and Best Plant Synthetic Biology, according to the team's project wiki. Masaryk University said the students beat teams from Oxford and Cambridge in Paris with what they called a "Duckweed Toolbox."
The centerpiece is a method the wiki calls TAIFR. By the team's account, it shortens stable duckweed transformation, the process of getting a plant to permanently carry an introduced genetic change, from roughly five months to roughly one. It does so through in planta transposase-assisted insertion, in which a transposase enzyme helps place new DNA directly in living plant tissue.
Those figures are the team's own. This reporting could not independently verify them, and nothing reviewed here indicates whether the technique carries over to other crops.
Why the European rules matter
The new EU law sorts gene-edited plants into two categories. NGT-1 plants are treated as equivalent to conventionally bred ones and are exempt from labeling, though seed must still be labeled. NGT-2 plants remain under the bloc's GMO rules. The Council says traits such as herbicide tolerance, and the production of known insecticidal substances, are excluded from NGT-1.
