VP Capital, the impact-first family office of the Van Puijenbroek family, has co-led a €1m pre-seed round in B-COS, a Ghent University spin-off using precision fermentation to produce biological crop protection products.
VP Capital is joined in the round by Agri Investment Fund (AIF), the venture fund of Flemish farmers' union Boerenbond, and Biotope by VIB, the Belgian biotech incubator that first backed B-COS and has been supporting the company since its founding. The round also includes a research grant from VLAIO, the Flemish Agency for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
For VP Capital, the deal is consistent with its impact-first mandate.
The Van Puijenbroek family office, which manages a diversified portfolio across energy transition, agrifood, and clean technology, is B Corp-certified and has its emissions reduction targets validated by the Science Based Targets initiative.
Erica van Eeghen, senior manager ventures at VP Capital, said the investment case rested on reliability rather than novelty.
"What convinced us in B-COS is not just the technology itself, but its potential to make biological crop protection a dependable choice in everyday farming practice," said van Eeghen.
B-COS uses engineered bacteria fed on simple sugar feedstocks to produce chitooligosaccharides, a class of bioactive compound with applications in crop protection. The company says its precision fermentation process delivers pharmaceutical-grade batch-to-batch consistency, in contrast to conventional biopesticides derived from natural raw materials, which the company says produce variable results in the field.
Its lead product targets tomato, offering protection against fungal disease and nematodes as well as improved drought resilience. The underlying platform can be tuned to produce different chitooligosaccharide structures for other crops and agronomic challenges, giving the company a broad product pipeline from a single core technology.
B-COS will use the proceeds to advance scale-up activities, navigate European regulatory approval, and bring its first products to greenhouse and field trials.
"What Europe needs is not just more biological alternatives, but better ones: products that deliver consistent, predictable results under real field conditions," Chiara Guidi, CEO and co-founder of B-COS, said in a press statement.
Alongside the funding, B-COS has entered an early discovery agreement with Nichino Europe, the European subsidiary of Japanese crop protection group Nihon Nohyaku, to evaluate the company's compounds across multiple crop protection applications.
B-COS was founded in June 2025 by Guidi, CTO Wouter Demeester, and co-founder Maaike Perneel. It was the first company launched through Ghent University's Fast Lane spin-off programme, and one of three ventures selected by Biotope following its biannual basecamp accelerator, as Impact Loop reported in September 2025.
The deal reflects growing investor appetite for biological alternatives to synthetic pesticides in Europe.
Roughly half of approved synthetic active substances have been withdrawn from the EU market since 2009, tightening the options available to European farmers and creating demand for reliable biological substitutes.