The project underscores why Africa, facing the world’s fastest‑escalating climate pressures, is emerging as a proving ground for next‑generation agtech.
The grant will fund the development of the Joint AI-driven Smallholder Omics Analytics (JASON) project, aimed at combining AI, genomics and remote sensing to identify climate‑adapted germplasm and gene targets for crop improvement.
AI meets omics
Heritable will build a cloud-based “AI genomics engine” that mines ancient and modern crop genomes, accelerating the discovery of traits that help crops withstand drought, heat and other extreme stresses.
“This project will allow us to stand up a cloud-based AI genomics engine, dramatically accelerating the discovery and deployment of climate-resilient germplasm,” said Tim Beissinger, CTO of Heritable Agriculture, who expects the platform to cut conventional breeding timelines by turning raw sequence data into high‑confidence gene edit targets.
Why Africa is ripe for agtech innovation
In many African countries, smallholder and other family‑run farms together produce the majority of domestically consumed food, and in some cases their share may approach or exceed 80%. Yet they remain the most vulnerable to climate shocks. With the continent warming faster than the global average and drought frequency rising, traditional breeding cycles simply can’t keep pace with the speed of climate change.
Most African smallholders rely almost entirely on rain‑fed agriculture, leaving them exposed to prolonged drought that leads to total crop failure and food insecurity and extreme heat, which stresses plants beyond physiological thresholds. Heat‑driven pest outbreaks also further depress yields.
These climate pressures create a cycle of income loss, debt, malnutrition and displacement, with ripple effects across local economies. Heritable believes this fragile context has made Africa a magnet for tools that shorten product development cycles, reduce risk, and deliver resilience faster – particularly AI‑enabled crop improvement technologies.
Heritable CEO Brad Zamft said the Gates Foundation’s investment validates this model: “A project like JASON represents over a decade of hard work from our team members shaping and sculpting a vision of an agricultural company that serves the global community, does good for the world, and builds a scalable business, all at the same time.”
A potential blueprint for climate-smart breeding
The project will help Heritable:
- Stand up a cloud-based AI genomics engine
- Predict functional alleles using multi‑omics data
- Feed multiplex gene‑editing designs directly into breeding pipelines
- Shorten the path from gene discovery to deployable germplasm
Given the speed at which climate extremes are intensifying, Heritable believes that shortening this cycle is becoming a cornerstone of any strategy to bolster food security in Africa and other LMICs.
Aiming for global impact
Based in San Carlos, California, Heritable says its long-term mission is to apply advanced AI, genomics and remote sensing to improve crops “across all regions, all crops, all traits.” The JASON project – backed by one of the world’s largest funders of agricultural development – positions the start‑up as a significant emerging player in the race to climate-proof the global food system.
