Ana I. Caño Delgado, CEO and co-founder of PLANeT Biotech: “The support of CDTI Innovation is enabling us to accelerate the development of precision biostimulants for more resilient agriculture”

Lack of water, extreme temperatures or soil salinity are part of the reality for many farmers. In an increasingly demanding climate context, the challenge is not only to produce more but to maintain the productivity and quality of crops when conditions do not accompany them.

In this scenario, PLANeT Biotech works, a technology-based company born as a spin-off of the Center for Research in Agrigenomics (CRAG). As the CEO and co-founder of the company, Ana, explains. I. Caño Delgado, “PLANeT Biotech was born to bring to the field our scientific discoveries that explain how plants adapt to drought and other environmental stresses.”

After two decades of work in plant biotechnology, the team saw the opportunity to turn that knowledge into useful tools for the agricultural sector.
 

Closing the gap between the laboratory and the field

For years, the molecular biology of plants has allowed us to know better how a plant detects a stress situation, what active mechanisms and how it tries to adapt. However, it is not always easy for this knowledge to reach the farmer as a product.

This need to bring research closer to the field was one of the reasons that prompted the creation of PLANeT Biotech. “Agriculture faces the challenge of producing more food with less water and in increasingly changing climate conditions,” says the CEO. After more than 20 years studying how plants perceive and respond to stress, the challenge was to turn that knowledge into practical solutions. “PLANeT Biotech was born precisely to close that gap and put science at the service of agriculture,” summarizes Caño Delgado.

With the support of the CDTI Innovation through NEOTEC, the company is advancing in the development of new generation biostimulants, with a defined scientific basis and oriented to respond to specific needs of the agricultural sector.
 

Science and technology for a new generation of biostimulants

The proposal of PLANeT Biotech is located within a new generation of biostimulants that seeks to bring more precision and scientific traceability to this type of agricultural solutions. “The main difference is that our products are born from knowledge of the biological mechanisms that allow plants to tolerate stress. We do not work by trial and error, but on the basis of specific physiological processes that we know and can modulate,” explains Caño Delgado.

That starting point allows the company to move towards products with a defined mode of action, a particularly important issue when seeking to move a technology from the laboratory to real growing conditions. “Our goal is not only to get a positive response in the plant, but to understand why it is produced and how to optimize it in real growing conditions,” he adds.

For PLANeT Biotech, knowing the mechanism of action is not just a scientific issue. It also allows to better orient the use of the product and bring greater confidence to farmers, distributors and regulators.
 

EARTH: activating plant resilience mechanisms

One of the company’s core elements is EARTH, its own molecular discovery platform. It is based on plant physiology and is inspired by some approaches to pharmaceutical development, although applied to the agricultural field. “The EARTH platform comes from a very simple idea: if we know how a plant survives drought, we can look for molecules capable of activating these mechanisms in a controlled way,” explains Caño Delgado.

This approach allows us to develop more accurate and reproducible solutions. In addition, PLANeT Biotech’s technology activates defensive pathways in the plant without modifying its genome or resorting to uncharacterized extracts.

From a scientific point of view, this makes it possible to work on known mechanisms; from a market point of view, it responds to an increasing demand for evidence-backed solutions. “Farmers want to know what they’re applying, how it works, and what results they can expect. Our approach responds precisely to that need for rigour, transparency and effectiveness,” says Caño Delgado.
 

Ndavant, solutions for crops under stress

The first PLANeT Biotech products are developed under the Ndavant brand and are designed to help crops maintain productivity and quality when faced with adverse conditions such as drought, high temperatures or salinity.

For the company, talking about agricultural resilience does not just mean that a plant survives an episode of stress. The challenge is that the crop can continue to produce when the water is limited, when its quality worsens or when environmental conditions become more difficult.

“Agricultural resilience is not just about resisting drought, it is about maintaining crop productivity and quality when water is scarce or of lower quality and when environmental conditions become more demanding,” explains the CEO and co-founder.

PLANeT Biotech’s products seek to optimize water use and sustain performance under real stress conditions. This point is especially relevant in intensive production systems, such as Mediterranean greenhouses, where a small variation in yield can have a significant economic impact for the producer.

“Rather than protecting the plant from a single stress factor, we seek to improve quality and performance in increasingly demanding production environments,” adds Caño Delgado.
 

The impulse of NEOTEC

For PLANeT Biotech, the support of CDTI Innovation through the NEOTEC initiative comes at a particularly important stage. The company is moving from research and initial validation to a phase in which it needs to strengthen equipment, advance agronomic and regulatory validation and prepare its business strategy. “The support of CDTI Innovation through NEOTEC has been key to accelerating our growth,” says Caño Delgado. The aid is allowing them, he explains, “to strengthen internal capacities, expand the equipment, advance the agronomic and regulatory validation of our products and prepare their commercial launch”.

In addition to financing, for the company this support also has a great value: “For a scientific spin-off like ours, it is a recognition of the innovative potential of our technology and helps us reduce the risk associated with the early stages of business development,” he stresses.

In this sense, the project reflects the role of instruments such as NEOTEC to accompany technology-based companies in a decisive phase: that which allows transforming research results into solutions with market potential.
 

Bringing more science to the field

For the next few years, PLANeT Biotech wants to expand its product portfolio, reach new crops and markets and consolidate itself as a reference company in plant resilience. “We want to continue transforming scientific knowledge into useful solutions for agriculture,” says Caño Delgado.

For the company, the future of the sector will increasingly involve incorporating science-based tools capable of responding to specific problems in the field. “We believe that agriculture will increasingly need science-based innovation to adapt to the production conditions of the future, and we want to contribute to that transformation by bringing effective, sustainable and research-backed solutions to the field,” he concludes.

With the support of CDTI Innovation, PLANeT Biotech is moving in that direction: turning years of research into plant biotechnology into products capable of helping crops respond better to an environment that is already changing.
 

CDTI Innovation

The Center for Technological Development and Innovation, CDTI E.P.E. It is the innovation agency of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, whose objective is the promotion of technological innovation in the business environment. The mission of the CDTI is to ensure that the Spanish business fabric generates and transforms scientific and technical knowledge into globally competitive, sustainable and inclusive growth. In 2025, within the framework of the Strategic Plan 2024-2027, the CDTI provided 2,423 million euros of support to Spanish companies and startups.

 
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