Foray Bioscience is scaling its technology, starting first with a partnership with tissue culture chestnut nursery West Coast Chestnut, as the company seeks funding for its next stage of growth.
Launched in 2022, Foray uses in-vitro plant cell cultures to grow parts of plants under a controlled lab setting, Ashley Beckwith, founder and CEO of Foray, told AgTechNavigator. From studying how these plant parts grow, Foray develops fabricated seed, “encapsulated plant embryos grown directly from plant cells that can be sown like a conventional seed to produce a whole plant,” the company shared in a press release.
A single cell “contains all the information that a plant needs to grow any part of that plant,” so biotech can “drive those cells to become a particular product or a particular seed,” she explained.
Foray’s process is supported by an AI-based platform called Pando, which makes predictions on how best to grow a plant or plant part to get a desired result, she explained. The agtech company will roll out a public version of its AI platform in the coming month, she added.
“Pando is essentially a Google Maps for plant science, where you know where you are starting, and you know the outcome that you are looking to achieve. And Pando brings together this global knowledge and can provide you with real-time guidance,” Beckwith elaborated.
How biotech, AI can help develop plant varieties faster
Foray’s technology can address a range of pressing agriculture issues, including the need to speed up the research and development cycle and create varieties that better response to climate change and environmental factors, Beckwith said.
“In agriculture, we are always facing new challenges, whether it is a new pathogen coming through, unexpected weather patterns, or disasters. And so our plant systems and our decisions around what to plant need to be moving quickly to keep pace with these changes that we are seeing day-to-day. But the process of bringing a new, specially adapted plant to market right now can lag decades,” Beckwith said.
She added, “When we are looking at the total cost of a seed, time is a big contributing factor. If you are bringing a new cultivar into the world and you have one plant — but you need 1,000s of plants — you might have to go through many generations of growth in order to collect enough seeds to bring that cultivar into the world and to our farmers. And so essentially, what we are doing is reducing the number of years.”
Foray partners with West Coast Chestnut
Foray started 2026 by securing its first commercial partnership with West Coast Chestnut, where the agtech company will develop fabricated seed for specific chestnut varieties that are regional to the Pacific Northwest, the company shared in a release.
“We’re excited to work with Foray to explore a new way of scaling chestnut propagation. We’ve spent years working a number of chestnut cultivars into tissue culture and then growing them to be ready for growers. However, the process of propagation of each cultivar is slow, and capital intensive. Fabricated seeds have the potential to unlock a new propagation pathway that is faster, more predictable, and designed to scale,” said Sawyer Clark of West Coast Chestnut, in a press release.