Category: Our News

Moa Technology has been selected to the prestigious Future Fifty programme, an annual initiative to propel the UK’s most ambitious late-stage tech companies on the path to unicorn status and international expansion.

Moa will join 24 other high-impact scaleups across AI, healthtech, aerospace and climate tech in this 2026 cohort.   Former alumni of the programme include decacorns Revolut and Wise, and more than one in three of the nation’s unicorns.

Carolyn Dawson OBE, CEO of Founders Forum Group, said: 

“Every year, more exciting companies build in the UK and Future Fifty is here to champion them and support their growth. These 25 businesses are building in some of the most important sectors out there. We built this programme to back them with the connections, insights and global exposure they need to scale on their own terms – while making sure the UK keeps producing companies that compete on the world stage.”

Moa awarded Defra funding to accelerate blackgrass control solutions for English farmers

Oxford, UK, 28th August 2026 – Moa Technology, a leader in the discovery of next-generation crop protection products, has been awarded over £900,000 in non-dilutive funding through the Defra Farming Innovation Investor Partnership (FIIP) programme delivered in partnership with innovate UK, to advance the development of exciting new solutions for the control of blackgrass.

Blackgrass costs UK agriculture hundreds of millions of pounds annually through reduced crop yields and increased input costs, which could rise to £1 billion a year in losses if blackgrass resistance to herbicides is allowed to spread unabated, according to Rothamsted Research.  Novel mode of action herbicides are widely agreed to be the key to fighting resistance, but none have become available to English farmers in the last 35 years, leaving them with increasingly limited options for effective control.

Moa has built on breakthrough research from Oxford University to successfully identify multiple novel herbicidal modes of action capable of breaking weed resistance, several of which have already shown excellent and consistent performance in five seasons of English and international field trials.  Among them is a particularly exciting post-emergent herbicide showing strong efficacy on English blackgrass in cereal crops in glasshouse and field trials.

The new Defra funding, which has been matched by nearly two million pounds of investment from Oxford Science Enterprises, a private sector investor, will help accelerate these advanced programmes towards commercialisation, creating a portfolio of new tools for farmers which are effective, safe, affordable and sustainable.

Farming Minister Stephen Morgan said:

“Blackgrass is one of the toughest challenges facing our arable farmers, reducing yields and making it harder to grow crops. That’s why we’re backing Moa Technology’s work through our Farming Innovation Investor Partnership to develop new herbicides to tackle it, alongside increasing farming innovation funding to £123 million this year.

By investing in innovation and backing the brilliant researchers and businesses developing solutions for farmers, we’re helping to build a more productive, sustainable and resilient farming sector for the future.”

Dr Virginia Corless, Chief Executive Officer of Moa Technology, said:

“Winning this funding award from the Farming Innovation Investor Partnership enables us to accelerate the development of novel herbicides which offer English farmers genuine hope in the fight to control blackgrass.  We are delighted to have received this support for our vital work and look forward to working closely with Defra, industry partners and the farming community.”

About the Farming Innovation Investor Partnership

The FIIP is delivered by Innovate UK in partnership with the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) and aims to support innovative agri-food businesses developing technologies that can improve productivity, sustainability and resilience across UK agriculture.

About Moa Technology

Moa Technology’s platform has already generated one of the most advanced pipelines of novel herbicide modes of action in the industry, with multiple programmes progressing through greenhouse and field evaluation. The company, which was spun out of Oxford University in 2017 and has research facilities in Oxford and North Yorkshire, already has four R&D partnerships with leading agriculture and crop protection companies in the US, Europe and Australia.   Moa recently secured a £22.2 million Series C financing round to support the next stage of its growth.

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Moa Technology and Corteva collaborate to accelerate discovery of novel herbicides

OXFORD, UK – 7 July 2026 – Moa Technology today announce a multi-year R&D platform collaboration with Corteva, a global agriculture technology leader, focused on advancing the discovery of novel herbicide solutions to address increasingly complex weed management challenges for farmers. The collaboration will deploy Moa’s proprietary discovery platforms with Corteva’s deep herbicide R&D expertise to accelerate the identification of novel modes of action for weed control solutions.

“Moa’s core strength is discovering genuinely novel tools to tackle rapidly evolving, yield-damaging weed threats,” said Dr Virginia Corless, CEO of Moa Technology. “We’re delighted to be working with Corteva on this project. The more commercial research collaborations we undertake with industry-leading companies, the faster we can accelerate delivery of safe, effective and affordable new solutions to farmers’ fields.”

“We’re excited to collaborate with Moa to advance the discovery of novel modes of action,” said Ashish Batra, vice president of crop health research and development for Corteva. “By combining complementary strengths, we aim to leverage Moa’s new approaches in herbicide discovery, and are focused on addressing the evolving challenges farmers face from weed resistance.”

Since Moa was spun out of Oxford University in 2017, its proprietary technology has discovered a new generation of synthetic and bio-herbicidal compounds based on novel modes of action capable of breaking weed resistance. This partnership is Moa’s fourth major industry collaboration signed in the last two years.

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About Moa Technology

In the last three years, Moa’s platforms have screened over 850,000 compounds and discovered more than 80 promising novel mode of action areas to help farmers fight the rising threat of weed resistance.   Its most advanced discoveries are now in their fifth season of international field trials, showing strong and consistent efficacy against some of the world’s toughest agricultural weeds.

The collaboration with Corteva is the fourth major deal Moa has signed since July 2024, following value-sharing deals with Netherlands-based Certis Belchim and US-based Gowan Company, and a major R&D partnership with Nufarm which has recently moved into its next stage of development.

Since Moa was first founded in 2017, Parkwalk Advisors – an early stage venture capital company which funds science and technology spin-outs from UK universities = has been one of our key investors.

Parkwalk’s annual Portfolio Showcase is an opportunity for its clients to see first hand how their capital has been put to work, and for companies like us to meet in person (and thank) the people who have made our ground-breaking discoveries possible.  These range from private individuals who helped get our company started with their investments in Parkwalk EIS schemes, to some of Europe’s biggest pension schemes and wealth managers, such as Railpen, UBS and London CIV.

At this year’s event, held at the Royal Society of Chemistry, we were pleased to update investors on our lead programmes and latest commercial partnerships and also to share a little about some very recent discoveries in our labs and glasshouses which could change the way crop protection is done forever.   We also fielded some great questions, ranging from the possible regulatory pathways for our Moa Amplifier product category, how you might go about scaling biological herbicides sourced from the deep sea bed, and whether our solutions might be able to help manage weeds in investors’ gardens (answer: yes, quite probably!)