28 September 2026, São Paulo: A Brazilian biotech alliance announced this month is aiming to change how biological pesticides are made in the country, pairing genome-editing science with industrial-scale manufacturing to develop a new generation of crop protection products, starting with a biofungicide for the country’s largest row crops.
Valeouro Biotec, an agricultural biologicals company that is part of the Ourofino group’s ecosystem, has partnered with Symbiomics, an agtech startup based in Santa Catarina, to co-develop biological crop inputs built on genomic editing and microbial reprogramming. The partnership, reported by Brazilian agribusiness outlet AgFeed on September 17, 2026, combines Symbiomics’ genomic sequencing and machine learning platform, built on a collection of more than 20,000 Brazilian microbial isolates, with Valeouro’s capacity to manufacture and commercialize biological products at scale.
The companies said their first target is a biofungicide for soybeans, corn, cotton and sugarcane, Brazil’s four most economically significant row crops. Rather than simply screening naturally occurring microbes for useful traits, the approach uses genetic modification to enhance specific performance characteristics in the microorganisms themselves, an approach the companies describe as building a new technology base for the biologicals sector rather than incrementally improving existing biological products.
The commercial timeline is long by industry standards. Valeouro is investing more than 100 million reais in a new biofactory, with a minimum of 75 million reais earmarked for the facility’s initial phase, which the company expects to become operational around 2029. The companies have said their first commercial products are projected to reach the market within the next decade, reflecting the multi-year development and regulatory pathway required for genetically modified microbial products, even in a market as active in biologicals as Brazil.
Rafael de Souza, chief executive of Symbiomics, said the goal is to be among the first movers with this kind of technology in the Brazilian market, while Luciano Galera, chief executive of Valeouro, framed the deal as a response to a market that will keep growing in volume but needs a different scientific foundation to keep growing in value. Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the partnership itself, separate from the biofactory investment.
The announcement lands in a Brazilian biologicals market that industry estimates put at roughly 6.2 billion reais in 2025, part of a broader Latin American biologicals sector estimated at close to 1 billion dollars, and one of the fastest-growing segments of the country’s overall crop protection market. Brazil has become a global proving ground for biologicals partly because of the sheer scale of its soybean and corn acreage and partly because its regulators, MAPA and Ibama, have built dedicated registration pathways for biological and bioinput products in recent years, even as the conventional chemical pesticide registration queue remains a persistent bottleneck.
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