With investment from FTW Ventures, Mythos Ventures, and both the Sunrise and Pioneer funds of SVG Ventures, Heritable has developed an AI platform to make plants programmable, with the goal to deliver higher yields, improved nutrition, better resilience to pathogen and climate stress, and faster seed breeding cycles at lower cost.
“Our AI-powered biotechnology platform has potential to address key challenges faced by the agriculture industry, including lowering the costs of crop improvement, boosting yields, enhancing disease resistance, and accelerating the development of new plant varieties,” said Dr. Brad Zamft, CEO and co-founder of Heritable Agriculture.
Heritable Agriculture combines advanced AI, the expanding field of multi-omics, new methods in predictive breeding, and high throughput gene editing.
Together, believes Heritable, these technologies offer groundbreaking new ways to breed plants to perform better in specific environments, or dial up particular properties like nutrition, colour, or flavour.
Three key services
The Heritable platform offers agriculture partners three key services: identifying important genes, designing specific edits to manipulate those genes, and predicting plant performance in the context of the local environment and management practices.
“Heritable combines an exceptional team, with industry-leading experience, a huge vision, and breakthrough technology. This aligned perfectly with our fund’s vision to solve the biggest challenges facing our worldwide food system,” said Brian Frank of FTW Ventures, who led the round.
“When we discovered them through our expert network, we were very excited to partner with the team.”
Machine learning experts
Heritable’s founders are machine learning experts and plant biologists with deep expertise in agriculture, artificial intelligence, and plant biology. The team, which includes Dr. Davide Sosso and Professor Tim Beissinger who have spent five years incubating Heritable at X where they developed Heritable’s AI and published experiments demonstrating the power of multi-omics data to improve plants and predict their performance even in new and changing environments.
They have added a fourth co-founder, Dan Voytas, a National Academy of Sciences member who has led the field of plant gene editing both in academia and in industry.
‘Exactly the innovation that ag needs’
Heritable’s vision extends beyond edible plants: they have teamed up with ArborGen, a global provider of tree seedlings, to accelerate the development of superior loblolly pine trees, native to southeastern US.
Its initial research suggests Heritable’s AI can halve the time needed for tree improvement. Both companies are now actively integrating this technology into their seedling production.
“Heritable Agriculture represents exactly the type of visionary innovation that agriculture needs right now,” said John Hartnett, founder & CEO of SVG Ventures.
“By combining cutting-edge AI with deep expertise in plant biology, they are fundamentally reimagining how we improve crops to meet the growing demands of a changing planet.
“We invested in Heritable through both our Pioneer and Sunrise Funds because we believe their technology will drive a step-change in productivity, resilience, and sustainability across the entire agri-food system.
“This is the kind of breakthrough that has the potential to solve some of the biggest challenges facing global agriculture.”
“Agriculture deserves moonshots,” said Dr. Astro Teller, X Captain of Moonshots. “Heritable’s mission to make our food systems more resilient is an example of the kind of global challenges we tackle at X.
“By developing tools to deepen our understanding of the plant world, the Heritable team has the potential to contribute to a more productive and sustainable agriculture industry.”
