You're pledging to donate if the project hits its minimum goal and gets approved. If not, your funds will be returned.
Every seed in industrial farming is treated with chemicals. It costs money, ends up in soil and water, and still leaves germination well below what the seed is capable of. We treat seed with tuned microwave energy, no chemicals, no residue, no waiting period. In our field trials this gave yield increases of 10–65% depending on crop and conditions, and we hold a recommendation from Ukraine's Ministry of Agrarian Policy.
Goal: turn our yield numbers into numbers somebody else measured.
Right now every result we can show was produced by us. That is the single thing blocking adoption — an agronomist at a seed plant has no reason to trust a Ukrainian company's own charts, and they are right not to. So the goal of this funding is narrow and specific: independent, third-party field trials of microwave seed treatment, with the protocol and the raw results published — including the crops where it doesn't work.
How: contract an outside agronomic institution to run controlled trials on 3–4 crops (wheat, maize, sunflower, soy) across a full season, treated vs. untreated, with germination, emergence and yield measured by them, not us. We supply the treatment and the regimes; they supply the plots, the measurement and the report. We publish whatever comes out.
Second goal, smaller: two demonstration units so we can install and run a first treatment free for new customers (they cover logistics only). Every unit we have is currently committed, which means we keep turning down exactly the pilots that would generate independent evidence.
Asking $45,000. Minimum: $8,000.
This is a slice of a larger evidence programme, not its total. Full independent validation of the technology — double-blind trials run abroad across a full range of crops — costs on the order of $500,000, and a serious multi-variety trial season with our Polish partners starts at €50,000. We are not asking Manifund to fund that. We are asking for the first, smallest verifiable step:
~$30,000 — one independent trial season with an external institution: 1–2 crops, treated vs. untreated, germination/emergence/yield measured and reported by them, not us
~$10,000 — parts and assembly toward a demonstration unit we can leave on a customer site (full unit cost ~$14,700; remainder from our own funds)
~$5,000 — logistics, sample transport, publication of the protocol and raw results
At the $8,000 minimum: one crop, one institution, one published trial. Small, but it is the first result about this technology that we did not produce ourselves.
Larger amounts scale directly and linearly: each additional ~$15,000 adds a crop or a variety to the trial programme. Our Polish partners are ready to run a 3–4 variety season at €50,000.
Four people, working out of Odesa, Ukraine, under a scientific-production enterprise (SIPC "KARE"):
Leonid Burdyka — CEO
Valeriy Prohorov — head of R&D; the microwave treatment regimes are his work
Valeriya Burdyka — project manager
Evgeniy Vasyliev (me) — business development; I handle partnerships, applications, and getting this in front of people.
Track record: the technology is not a concept — it exists at pre-serial stage and has treated seed for real agricultural customers. We hold a recommendation from Ukraine's Ministry of Agrarian Policy. We raised a €25,000 EU grant with a Seal of Excellence through the Seeds of Bravery programme (2024–2025), and about $265,000 has gone into the project in total. I have 10+ years moving deep-tech from workshop to customer, currently across several projects at KARE including defence robotics under a state contract.
What we have not done: run a trial we didn't control. That is what this is for.
Most likely failure: the independent trials come back weaker than ours. Yield response to microwave treatment depends on crop, moisture, storage and soil, and it is entirely possible an outside institution measures 5% where we measured 30%. If that happens we publish it anyway. The outcome is that the technology gets honestly bounded — useful for some crops and conditions, not a general solution — which is worth knowing and is better than the current situation where nobody can check.
Second: the regimes don't transfer. Our advantage is a library of power/exposure/moisture combinations built empirically. If those turn out to be tuned to our own equipment and our own seed lots, the trials will show noise, and the honest conclusion is that the technology isn't ready to leave our building.
Third, and most boring: war. We are in Odesa. Power outages, mobilisation, damage to facilities. Mitigation is thin — the equipment is small and movable, and the regimes are documented rather than living in one person's head.
Failure outcome overall: we would have spent this money producing negative or ambiguous public evidence about a treatment method that other groups are also pursuing. That still moves the field forward, which is more than our current position of unverifiable claims.
We raised a €25,000 EU grant with a Seal of Excellence through the Seeds of Bravery programme (2024–2025), and about $265,000 has gone into the project in total.