VP Capital joins €2.6 million seed round at agtech Gravity Gardens

VP Capital, the van Puijenbroek family office, has joined the €2.6 million seed round at Gravity Gardens, a Nijmegen agricultural technology company, alongside Brightlands Venture Partners and Graduate Ventures, though the size of the family office's cheque was not disclosed. The round mixes equity with EFRO regional development funding, and total funding at the company now stands above €3 million after earlier support from StartLife and a Rabobank innovation loan.

Gravity Gardens works on dry seed activation, which lets treated seed establish more strongly and cope with stress—drought above all—without water, chemicals or a coating, and avoids the extra handling, cost, and shortened usability window of wet priming, the established alternative. The company runs a Nijmegen facility that combines research, development and production, is a member of the ESA Business Incubation Centre in Noordwijk, and works with Vertify, HLB and HAN University on trials; seven external trial programmes have been completed, including validation by Vertify. The new money is marked for industrial-scale equipment built with Demcon and wider trials across additional crops, with market readiness targeted for 2027.

VP Capital describes itself as seventeen people working from Goirle in the Netherlands and Turnhout in Belgium, descended from the textile company Hendrik van Puijenbroek founded in 1865, and six generations later it calls its own arc an evolution from family business into family office. It invests across five asset classes—direct growth-stage investments, direct ventures, funds, real estate through VP Vastgoed, and listed equity—and five domains: agri-food, built environment, clean technology, energy and textile. B Corp certified and a signatory to the Science Based Targets initiative and the Finance for Biodiversity Pledge, its portfolio includes Orbisk, Mariva Materials, Affix Labs, Solarix, Fiber Foods, BYBORRE and Trunkrs.

The position also tests what VP Capital changed in 2024, when it inverted its own model to put impact first and judge it through a financial lens. A seed cheque in Dutch agritech will be read both ways. Equity raised next to EFRO regional development funding points to public regional money carrying part of the earliest burden, though the announcement does not say so, and a family office arriving at seed stage alongside two venture firms is likely taking a minority slice of the €2.6 million rather than the headline number. Whose cheque was largest is not disclosed. The next hard marker is 2027, when the Demcon-built equipment has to show that the process scales.