On paper, the pitch sounds almost too good: a pesticide that knows the difference between a pest and a honeybee.
That's the wager a four-person team in Toronto is making. Molagri, which emerged from Y Combinator's Summer 2026 cohort, is engineering virus-like particles designed to lock onto gut receptors found only in target insects. Once inside, the particles deliver genetic instructions that hijack the pest's own cells, forcing them to produce a species-specific toxin. Zaky Hassan and Min Jin—both PhD structural biologists from the University of Toronto with publications in Nature Communications—describe their approach as "resistance-free" pest control, though that claim will face scrutiny as the technology moves from lab bench to cornfield.
The market they're chasing is undeniably large. Grand View Research projects the biopesticides industry will balloon from $8.4 billion in 2025 to $26.1 billion by 2033, a compound annual growth rate just north of 15%. Whether Molagri can capture meaningful share in that expansion depends on questions the founders can't yet answer with published data: Does the science hold up in real soil? Can they manufacture at scale? And will evolution, as it so often does, find a workaround?
When Pollinators Became Too Expensive to Lose
The momentum behind selective pest control isn't purely scientific curiosity. It's economic necessity laced with regulatory pressure.
Roughly three-quarters of global food crops rely on animal pollination, according to FAO data. In the United States, that dependence translates into hard costs. USDA figures from early 2026 show almond growers paid $181 per colony for pollination services in 2025—nearly triple the $66 average for other crops. A study published in Science Direct last year attempted to quantify what happens if pollinator populations continue their decline: crop prices could rise 30%, the researchers estimated, triggering a $729 billion hit to global welfare.
Those projections now carry regulatory weight. The EPA finalized its Insecticide Strategy under the Endangered Species Act in April 2025, raising the bar for any product that threatens pollinators. The agency updated its Pollinator Risk Assessment Guidance in June 2026, tightening how it evaluates systemic and colony-level effects. Europe, characteristically, moved faster. The EU's Nature Restoration Law took effect in August 2024 with a mandate to reverse pollinator declines by 2030, complete with monitoring requirements that treat pollinator health as measurable policy, not aspiration.
Even emergency use pathways—historically a regulatory relief valve—reflect the shift. The UK denied emergency authorization for Cruiser SB, a neonicotinoid seed treatment, in 2024; by mid-2026, the Office for Environmental Protection had documented process reforms following investigations into how previous emergency pesticide decisions were made. The EU withdrew its broader Sustainable Use Regulation in March 2024, but member states pressed ahead anyway with integrated pest management protocols and new labeling rules for pollinator protection.
The message to chemical manufacturers and startups alike: if your product can't distinguish friend from foe, the path to market is narrowing.
A Crowded Race Toward Precision
The field is fracturing along distinct technology lines, each with its own promise and pitfalls.
RNA interference sprays work by targeting pests through sequence complementarity, essentially silencing genes in highly specific ways. GreenLight Biosciences secured Belgian emergency authorization in May 2026 for Calantha, a dsRNA insecticide aimed at Colorado potato beetles. It marked the first RNA-based insecticide authorized in the EU, though emergency pathways remain narrow and crisis-dependent. Field studies from 2025 and 2026 show Calantha controls the beetle effectively—at least initially. But resistance is already emerging. Beetles have begun reducing dsRNA uptake through altered clathrin-mediated pathways, a reminder that precision and durability are not synonyms.
Peptide bioinsecticides, derived from venom sequences, have moved faster through regulatory channels. Vestaron's SPEAR LEP secured multiple European emergency authorizations across Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Cyprus in 2025 and 2026. The company won EPA approval for BASIN on outdoor crops in January 2026, a milestone Vestaron's CEO called a "defining moment" for peptide technology. The products carry new mechanism-of-action codes from the Insecticide Resistance Action Committee and emphasize favorable safety profiles for pollinators and beneficial insects—when used as labeled, the careful phrasing farmers and regulators have learned to watch for. Vestaron received a European Bee Award in 2023, though awards tend to follow marketing as much as science.
Pheromones offer something closer to foolproof specificity: mating disruption with no toxicity at all. FMC, which acquired BioPhero in 2022, registered its first Sofero product—targeting fall armyworm—in Brazil in April 2025. Provivi, a competitor in the pheromone space, has projected the segment will hit $6.3 billion by 2033, though company forecasts warrant the usual grain of salt. Still, the regulatory pathway for pheromones is well-worn and the environmental risk profile minimal, advantages that matter when approval timelines stretch into years.
Virus-like particles—protein shells without genetic material—represent the frontier Molagri is betting on. Academic reviews published between 2023 and 2026 describe VLP-mediated delivery as promising but decidedly pre-commercial. A 2024 lab study used Drosophila X virus-like particles to ferry a scorpion toxin peptide against spotted-wing drosophila, proof of concept in a controlled setting. Molagri's twist adds receptor targeting via gut-specific ligands, designed to ensure the particle only activates inside the intended pest.
The company's fermentation-based manufacturing platform is positioned as both scalable and modular, theoretically allowing the team to retarget new pests without rebuilding the entire system. But no peer-reviewed Molagri data exists yet, and the gap between lab models and a product farmers will spray on 500 acres of soybeans remains wide.
Smart Sprayers Amplify Selective Chemistry
The shift toward selective pesticides is getting an assist from precision application technology, creating a compounding effect on pollinator safety.
John Deere reported that customers using its See & Spray system treated 5 million acres in 2025, cutting non-residual herbicide use by an average of 50%. USDA Agricultural Research Service trials in specialty crops showed intelligent sprayers can reduce drift by up to 87% and slash overall pesticide use by 30% to 85%, depending on crop and target. Lower drift and reduced off-target exposure ease the burden on pollinators even when conventional chemistries are in the tank. Pair selective bioinsecticides with precision delivery and you get something that could define the next iteration of integrated pest management—assuming the economics pencil out for growers operating on thin margins.
The Resistance Paradox: Precision Doesn't Mean Permanent
Evolution, inconveniently, doesn't care how elegant your molecular targeting is.
Several studies published in late 2025 documented dsRNA resistance in Colorado potato beetles, with mechanisms ranging from reduced clathrin-mediated uptake to altered environmental responses under temperature stress. A 2026 paper in Pest Management Science made the case explicit: RNA-based products need insect resistance management protocols just like conventional chemistries. Sequence rotation, multi-mechanism stacking, integrated stewardship plans—the whole toolkit.
Molagri's "resistance-free" framing will face hard questions as products advance toward commercialization. The company says it's modeling pest evolution to pre-empt resistance, a novel approach but one with zero field validation so far. The history of pest control is littered with silver bullets that worked brilliantly until they didn't.
Regulatory Pathways: Higher Bars, Clearer Routes
The regulatory environment for genetic and molecular biopesticides is being written in real time, which means both opportunity and uncertainty.
The OECD published guidance in 2023 on human health risk assessment for externally applied dsRNA-based pesticides, giving regulators and applicants a shared framework. EFSA's updated Bee Guidance from May 2023 now underpins EU bee risk assessments, with implementation steps rolling out through 2025 and 2026. The EPA's June 2026 Pollinator Risk Assessment Guidance and April 2025 Insecticide Strategy create a higher bar for products that threaten endangered species—but also, perhaps more importantly, a clearer path for low-risk alternatives.
Emergency use authorizations have become an unofficial testing ground for novel biopesticides in Europe. GreenLight's Belgian approval and Vestaron's multi-country EUAs show that member states will deploy experimental tools under acute pest pressure, even while full EU registrations take years. Bee Vectoring Technologies secured Mexican approval for its Clonostachys rosea fungicide in August 2024, expanding the precision delivery concept beyond sprays to insect-vectored biologicals—bees, essentially, working as unpaid farmhands.
The Long Road from Lab to Field
Market size estimates for biopesticides vary depending on who's counting and what they're counting. Figures for 2025 range from $7.98 billion to $9.91 billion, but directional growth is consistent across sources. Europe, often a regulatory bellwether, is projected to expand from roughly $2.17 billion in 2025 to somewhere between $3.84 billion and $5.56 billion by 2030 or 2031, depending on the report. Fortune Business Insights pegs the broader agricultural biologicals category—biopesticides, biostimulants, biofertilizers—at $11.5 billion globally in 2026, reaching $40.6 billion by 2034.
For early-stage companies like Molagri, those market
