KWS is a 170-year-old, family-owned plant breeding and seed company operating across 70+ countries with ~5,000 employees. The tech stack reveals a hybrid legacy-to-modern transition: core SAP + Oracle/PostgreSQL operations being replaced by cloud-native Databricks + Spark + AWS infrastructure, alongside active adoption of SAP S/4HANA. A data lakehouse migration project, combined with pain-point pressure on time-to-market and breeding program efficiency, signals KWS is modernizing analytics to accelerate product development cycles in a capital-intensive, regulation-heavy business.
Notable leadership hires: Head of Region, Head of Sales, Director Sales, Head of Commercial, Seed Technology Lead
KWS develops and produces seeds for corn, sugar beets, cereals, rapeseed, sunflowers, and vegetables, selling globally to agricultural operators and distributors. The company operates a research-driven organization—research roles represent the largest hiring cohort—underpinned by breeding trials, field trials, and a breeders' academy program. Operations span manufacturing, logistics, and compliance-heavy supply chains across multiple geographies. The business faces pressure on time-to-market, production optimization, and regulatory navigation, driving recent investments in legacy application redevelopment and data infrastructure modernization.
KWS uses SAP, SuccessFactors, Oracle, PostgreSQL, AWS (Athena, Spark), Databricks, Azure DevOps, Salesforce, and Docker/Kubernetes. It is actively adopting SAP S/4HANA and migrating data systems to a lakehouse architecture.
KWS has approximately 5,000 employees across more than 70 countries. The company is headquartered in Einbeck, Germany, and is privately held.
Other companies in the same industry, closest in size