This week, Google’s “moonshot” factory, Google X, announced its latest graduate. Heritable Agriculture (19459029) is a startup that uses data and machine learning to improve the way crops are grown.
According to the firm’s announcement, An announcement post was published on Tuesday. Plants are efficient and impressive systems. Heritable wrote that plants are solar-powered, carbon-negative, self assembling machines which feed on sunlight and a water source.
Yet, agriculture places a huge strain on the Earth and its resources. Around 25% (of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions) are attributed to agriculture. It is the largest consumer of groundwater on Earth and can cause soil erosion and water contamination via pesticides and fertilizers.
This newly independent startup tackles these global issues using what Google is best at: analyzing large datasets with artificial intelligence and machine-learning. Data collection is relatively easy. The hard part is turning all this data into useful instructions for growers in order to bring the 12,000 year old industry into the 21st Century. Brad Zamft, founder and CEO of Heritable Architecture, planted the seeds for Heritable Architecture. The physics doctoral candidate spent a year working as chief scientific officer for TL Biolabs, a venture-backed startup. Zamft then joined Google X in late 2018 and quickly became the project leader of what would eventually become Heritable.
I was given the freedom to work on anything, as long as it would scale up to a Google size business,” Zamft told TechCrunch. “That was the directive. The idea that we could optimize plants better stuck with me, and it gained traction among the leadership. We did a good job of moving through the Google X gauntlet.”
Heritable uses machine learning to analyze plant genomes in order to determine combinations which could improve yields while lowering water usage and increasing carbon storage capacity. The models were tested on thousands plants grown in a “specialized chamber” at X headquarters in the Bay Area. Researchers also conducted fieldwork in California, Nebraska and Wisconsin.
According to the company, it has no plans to investigate mutagenesis – a GMO method that uses chemicals or radiation to create mutations in crops. Zamft says that CRISP gene editing will play a part in the future of making plants “programmable”but Heritable has chosen to focus on more conventional methods for now. Zamft says that genetic modification and gene-edited crops are not on the roadmap. “Gene editing will come eventually, but we are seeing a large, unmet need to identify what to breed, and then do better breeding — crossing mother and father plants, and not using biotechnology to develop the [crop].”
The executive adds that the team is most immediately focused on commercializing the technology. Zamft did not reveal anything in the way of specific timelines or commercial partners. He did note, however, that Heritable has fittingly raised a seed round, featuring FTW Ventures, Mythos Ventures, and SVG Ventures.
Google is an investor as well, with an undisclosed amount of equity in the young company.
Google laid off dozens from X last January, as part of company-wide cuts. Under the leadership of lab head Astro Teller, the corporate incubator has begun to more aggressively spin off companies like Heritable.
Brian Heater is the Hardware Editor at TechCrunch. He worked for a number of leading tech publications, including Engadget, PCMag, Laptop, and Tech Times, where he served as the Managing Editor. His writing has appeared in Spin, Wired, Playboy, Entertainment Weekly, The Onion, Boing Boing, Publishers Weekly, The Daily Beast and various other publications. He hosts the weekly Boing Boing interview podcast RiYL, has appeared as a regular NPR contributor and shares his Queens apartment with a rabbit named Juniper.
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