Agronomics (LSE: ANIC) is a classic UK penny stock, trading at just 6.5p per share as I write on Tuesday morning (28 April). And it has a modest market cap of £70.2m. But brokers have a powerful price target of 14.4p on it, which could turn every £5,000 invested today into £11,077.

The share price has fallen 74% over the past five years. But since the start of 2025, it’s picked up 50%. I think we might be looking at a cracking recovery prospect here that’s slipped under the radar.

Now that analysts are sniffing round, let’s take a closer look.

What is it?

Agronomics is a venture capital company, and it invests heavily in cellular agriculture technology. That’s growing meat and fish cells, and organic products, in the lab rather than farming real live animals and plants. It has its fingers in a number of promising start-up pies.

In the past few years, the company has been making only tiny profits — or losses, as in fiscal 2024 and 2025. But February’s first-half results update reported “a significant turnaround in unaudited interim results … achieving a net profit of £10,012,753 compared to a loss of £6,555,201 in the prior year period.”

We saw earnings per share of 0.991p. If that’s equalled in the second half, it would mean a lowly price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio of just 4.5 based on its penny share price.

Technology coming good

There’s been a stream of good news from some of Agronomics’ start-up investments too. Most recently, Clean Food Group has secured a new external £4.5m investment, plus a £0.7m Innovate UK grant. And it’s just launched its CLEANOil product, using “fermentation technology and circular feedstocks such as surplus bread” to target the cosmetics industry.

And Tropic Biosciences UK has raised $105m funding for its gene-edited tropical crops development. We’re talking bananas, rice, and a pipeline of other climate-resilient food crops.

Oh, and Executive Chair Jim Mellon has been hoovering up the stock through February and March. At the last count, he held 165,775,997 shares. They might only be worth 6.5p each at the moment, but that still adds up to a bit more than pocket money. Seeing this kind of buying definitely grabs my attention.

Pros and cons

This is clearly a risky penny stock, with a few dangers:

• No sustainable profits yet.
• Liquidity still depends on financing.
• Slow progress could hit the share price.

But there are clear positive signs:

• Significant first-half profit.
• 50% discount to net asset value.
• Director purchases.

To sum up…

In short, yes, this could be another penny-stock hopeful that goes nowhere. But on the positive side, it might not need too many of its holdings to come good to send the share price trajectory skywards. That broker price target is only short term, and there could be a lot more to come. Maybe it can soon shake off its penny stock status.

I reckon growth investors should definitely consider Agronomics, even if it’s only for a modest stake in their Stocks and Shares ISA.