Deep beneath every healthy forest lies an invisible web of mycorrhizal fungi, ancient, symbiotic organisms that have quietly sustained all the plant life on Earth for over 460 million years. Now, Edinburgh-based biotechnology company Rhizocore Technologies is tapping into the incredible power of these underground networks to revolutionise forest restoration around the world. Founded in 2021, the startup has created a proprietary fungal pellet technology that radically improves survival rates as well as speeds up tree growth, with results that have surprised the traditional forestry industry and secured £4.5M of new funding to scale its innovation in the US and beyond.
What are mycorrhizal fungi and why do trees need them for survival
The science behind Rhizocore's technology is rooted in one of nature's most enduring partnerships. Research published in
PLOS Pathogens confirms that mycorrhizal associations, the mutually beneficial relationships between fungi and plant roots, play pivotal roles in nutrient exchange and tree survival. Ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi, in particular, colonise the roots of species such as oak, birch, pine, beech and lime, extending far beyond the roots' own reach and acting as a secondary delivery system for water, phosphorus and nitrogen.
The trouble, according to Rhizocore, is that these fungi are routinely absent from degraded or cleared land. When forests are felled and soils are disturbed, the fungal communities that once sustained them collapse. Saplings planted on such sites are left to establish themselves in biologically impoverished earth without their natural underground allies, which is a key reason why tree mortality after planting remains dangerously high across the industry.
Rhizocore's RhizoPellet technology: Engineering a fungal solution for woodland regeneration
Rhizocore's answer to this problem is elegantly simple in concept but sophisticated in execution. The company produces small, rectangular grey pellets branded RhizoPellets™ that are placed directly into the planting hole alongside a young sapling at the time of planting. Each pellet contains living ectomycorrhizal fungi, carefully cultivated in the lab and selected specifically for the planting site's soil conditions, tree species and geographic environment.
This precision matters enormously. What works for a Sitka spruce on a clear-felled hillside in the Scottish Highlands may be entirely unsuitable for a downy birch on former agricultural pasture in the English Midlands. To enable this site-specific matching, Rhizocore has built what it describes as one of the world's largest living fungal libraries, a continually growing collection of fungal strains drawn from ecosystems across the globe. Operating out of the UK Agri-Tech Centre's Northern Innovation Hub in Roslin, near Edinburgh, the company's scientists catalogue and test these strains to identify the highest-performing candidates for each unique planting context.
The biological mechanism is well established. A peer-reviewed study published in the
Journal of Fungi (2023) found that mycorrhizal inoculation significantly increased the survival and photosynthesis rates of native woody plant species following wildfire events, evidence that fungal partnerships are not merely beneficial but critical for tree establishment in stressed environments. Similarly, a 2025 study in
Plant-Environment Interactions highlighted how the mycorrhizal association between trees and soil fungi can dramatically shift nutrient acquisition depending on soil conditions, underscoring why Rhizocore's locally adapted approach is scientifically sound rather than a one-size-fits-all intervention.
Field trial results: Tree survival rate of 97% compared to 78% for untreated saplings
The company's field data has attracted widespread attention across the UK forestry sector. At Forestry and Land Scotland's Damside site in North Lanarkshire, trees treated with RhizoPellets™ recorded a 97% survival rate twelve months after planting, compared to just 78% for untreated saplings, a relative improvement of 25%.
Forestry and Land Scotland confirmed these findings and announced plans to expand the use of pellets across multiple sites in the next planting season.
At a site owned by Trees for Life, one of the UK's leading native woodland restoration charities, the results were even more striking. Downy birch saplings paired with RhizoPellets™ grew thirteen times faster than both control and fertilised trees over twelve months, a result that has no precedent in conventional forestry practice. Sitka spruce trials on former pasture land also showed growth rates 23% faster than untreated controls. Rhizocore now operates across more than 100 active field sites, spanning heather moorlands, high-altitude locations, former farmland and previously cleared forest.
£4.5 million investment to expand fungal biotechnology and scale into North America
In November 2025, Rhizocore announced it had secured £4.5 million in a funding round led by The First Thirty, a specialist investor in soil health technologies. The round also included participation from Scottish Enterprise, The Grosvenor Estate (one of the UK's largest landowners and an existing customer), Sand River, Generation-Re (Regenerative Agriculture Syndicate), Kibo Invest, John Thomson and Old College Capital, the in-house venture investment fund of the University of Edinburgh, which has backed Rhizocore since its earliest days as a spinout from the University's Roslin Institute.
The investment will primarily fuel Rhizocore's expansion into the United States, where more than 1.4 billion trees are planted, a market of enormous scale. The company's production capacity for the 2025–26 planting season was already sold out in full before the funding round closed, a signal of overwhelming commercial demand. The funding will allow Rhizocore to increase production to meet orders from existing and new partners, while investing further in its fungal library and field monitoring infrastructure.
Dr Parkes has been emphatic that the North American push is driven by genuine ecological urgency. The US forestry sector faces mounting pressures from wildfires, prolonged drought and reduced milling capacity, precisely the conditions under which RhizoPellet technology offers the greatest advantage, since the fungi's drought-resistance properties become most critical in environmentally stressed landscapes.
A mycological revolution taking root: What Rhizocore means for global forestry
What Rhizocore has achieved in a few short years since its 2021 founding is a compelling demonstration that the most powerful forces in nature are often the ones least visible to the naked eye. By working with the biology that forests evolved over hundreds of millions of years, rather than against it, the Edinburgh startup has unlocked growth and survival improvements that decades of fertiliser use and selective breeding could not replicate.
The implications extend well beyond Scotland. As governments worldwide commit to ambitious afforestation targets in the race to net zero, the gap between trees planted and trees that survive to maturity remains a chronic, underreported failure point. Rhizocore's RhizoPellets offer a genuinely new answer to that problem, one that is grounded in rigorous science, proven in the field across diverse ecosystems, and now backed by serious capital ready to scale it across continents.
If the fungi have had their way underground for 460 million years, Rhizocore is simply ensuring they get their chance in the forests of the future.
The forest was never just the trees. It was always the network beneath them, the invisible infrastructure that moved water and nutrients and kept the whole system alive. Rhizocore did not invent that system. It simply found a way to put it back where it belongs
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