“Making Plants Programmable”

Heritable Agriculture is developing an AI platform to “make plants programmable”, with the goal to deliver higher yields, improved nutrition, better resilience to pathogens and climate stress, with faster seed breeding cycles at a lower cost.

🔗Check Them Out Here: heritable.ag

The Macro

If Norman Borlaug had access to AI, he might have done in a year what took him two decades.

That’s the fundamental promise of Heritable Agriculture — a Google-born, AI-driven breeding company that wants to accelerate crop improvement at an unprecedented scale.

If history is any indication, this kind of technological shift has the potential to reshape global agriculture.

Key Macroeconomic Drivers

• Critical food-producing regions like California’s Central Valley and the North China Plain are depleting groundwater faster than it can be replenished.

• Drought-resistant and nitrogen-efficient crops, like those Heritable is developing, could help mitigate these risks by reducing water usage and reliance on synthetic fertilizers.

• Conventional breeding takes 7–15 years per cultivar, delaying responses to threats and deseases.

• Seed genetics R&D is dominated by a handful of large corporations, leaving smallholder farmers with limited access to cutting-edge improvements.

Investment Landscape

Heritable just raised a seed round on January 30th, amount undisclosed.

Investors:

• FTW Ventures

• Mythos Ventures

• SVG Ventures

Apart from that, agricultural biotechnology has been a magnet for venture capital, with $40 billion invested in the past decade. Companies like Inari (focused on genome editing) and Pivot Bio (developing microbial treatments for soil) have drawn significant investor interest.

The Impact

They are stepping into a competitive yet underexplored niche. While giants like Bayer and Corteva dominate the seed market, their breeding programs rely on conventional methods augmented by genetic editing.

Heritable’s AI-driven approach introduces a new paradigm, one that could allow smaller breeders and niche crops to see the kind of yield improvements that industrial commodities like corn and soy have enjoyed for decades.

If breeding costs drop significantly, a broader range of crops could see meaningful genetic improvements. Berries, avocados, oats, barley—crops that haven’t seen major yield gains in the past century—could finally catch up.

This could democratize access to high-performance seeds, making agriculture more adaptable to diverse climates and farming practices worldwide.

How Does Heritable Agriculture Stand Out?

Unlike many farming technology companies that focus on equipment, chemicals, or changing plant genes directly, Heritable analyzes huge collections of plant genetic information to make better breeding decisions.

They use advanced computer models to find the best genetic combinations for traditional breeding.

Whether your needs are phenotype prediction, causal gene identification, or the design of effective genome edits. Their platform can also predict performance in new environments, performance of new genotypes, or both.

They achieve this with models that incorporate sequence, weather, soil, and climate data to match the right variety to the right location, slashing time-to-market while reducing the need for expensive field trials.

This helps create crops with helpful traits like higher yields, lower water needs, and better carbon storage in their roots and soil.

Examples

• Reduced fertilizer dependence through nitrogen-efficient crops lowers environmental impact.

• AI-driven breeding could accelerate the development of nutrient-dense crops, such as iron-biofortified rice or high-oleic soybeans, potentially reducing global micronutrient deficiencies affecting 2 billion people.

• AI and gene-editing platform cuts breeding cycles by 50–75%, making advanced crop traits more accessible across the industry.

Potential Challenges and Risks

• Regulatory uncertainty

• Ethical considerations

• Pathogen evolution risks

The Business

Business Model

The Problem: Traditional breeding is slow (7–15 years per cultivar), expensive, and ineffective against rapid climate change, soil degradation, and shifting dietary needs.

The Solution: Heritable’s AI-driven platform accelerates trait discovery, reducing breeding cycles by 50–75% and optimizing crops for yield, nutrition, and environmental resilience.

What they sell:

• Gene Discovery: Identifies beneficial genetic traits for better crops.

• Edit Design: Predicts optimal genetic modifications for desired traits.

• Genomic Prediction: Uses AI to forecast crop performance and breeding outcomes.

Who Buys From Them: Agribusinesses, seed companies, food producers, and governments aiming to enhance food security.

Why Customers Choose Them: Their AI-driven platform dramatically reduces breeding time and costs, outperforming traditional methods while making advanced crop improvement accessible to more players in the industry.

Fundraising

• Seed Round
  Amount: Undisclosed
  Investors: FTW Ventures, Mythos Ventures, and SVG Ventures’ Sunrise and Pioneer funds.
  Date: January 30, 2025.

Founder Story

Dr. Brad Zamft is a physicist turned synthetic biologist with a PhD from UC Berkeley. Worked in George Church's lab, gained policy experience at AAAS, and led climate-focused projects at Google X before founding Heritable Agriculture. Currently serves as CEO.

Dr. Davide Sosso is a plant biologist specializing in agriculture and AI. As co-founder, he applies his expertise to develop Heritable's AI-powered biotechnology platform that optimizes plant breeding.

Professor Tim Beissinger is a quantitative geneticist who co-founded Heritable Agriculture. Specializes in analyzing complex genetic data to improve crop breeding decisions without direct genetic modification.

Dan Voytas is a renowned plant gene editing expert and National Academy of Sciences member. Brings extensive knowledge of gene editing technologies to help develop Heritable's AI-driven approach to crop improvement.

Jobs

• Senior Genomic Scientist

More Resources

• Transforming Plants with Brad Zamft | The Climate Biotech podcast (Spotify)

• Heritable Agriculture is bringing AI to crop breeding (The Economist)

• Heritable Agriculture Launch Press Release (Heritable Agriculture)

Our Analysis

The genius of Heritable lies not in what they're building but where they're starting. By focusing initially on traditional breeding rather than gene editing, they've created a regulatory-friendly Trojan horse. They get to build massive predictive datasets while competitors navigate CRISPR's regulatory landscape.

What makes this approach cunning is that non-GMO crops face minimal regulatory scrutiny. This allows Heritable to rapidly deploy, test, and iterate their models across multiple crops and regions.

They're essentially running a biological inference engine at continental scale while building the world's most valuable agricultural prediction dataset.

Consider their work with ArborGen on loblolly pine, a crop that takes decades to mature. By reducing lignin content by 40% and potentially extending tree lifespans from 30 to 55 years, they're demonstrating value in long-cycle crops that traditional breeding approaches can't touch.

The Death of Geographic Specialization?

Agriculture has always been defined by geographic specialization, growing what works where you are. Heritable's approach could flip this model entirely. Their technology enables breeding crops specifically optimized for hyperlocal conditions.

This has profound implications beyond yields. It could reverse the century-long consolidation of agricultural varieties. Instead of forcing standardized seeds to work in diverse environments with chemical assists, Heritable enables the opposite: customized crops designed specifically for their growing environment.

The Risk

Paradoxically, I think, Heritable's biggest risk isn't technical failure, it's being too successful too quickly. If they demonstrate dramatic yield or resilience improvements, they'll face enormous pressure from both investors and agriculture giants to accelerate commercialization.

This pressure could push them toward the easier path of selling out to a Bayer or Corteva rather than building their platform to its full potential.

The true disruption comes not from improving existing commodity crops but from elevating neglected crops like cassava, which feeds 800 million people yet has seen minimal breeding investment.

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