Heritable agriculture, a startup that uses AI to increase crop yields, is spun out by Google’s X
Google’s “moonshot” factory, X, announced this week its latest graduate. Heritable agriculture is a startup that uses data and machine learning to improve the way crops are grown. As the firm stated in a post on Tuesday, plants are efficient and impressive systems. Heritable stated that plants are self-assembling, solar powered machines which consume sunlight and water. Agriculture is responsible for 25% of all greenhouse gas emissions. It’s the planet’s largest consumer of groundwater and can lead to soil erosion and water pollution via pesticides, fertilizers, and other chemicals.
The newly independent startup is approaching these global issues by doing what Google does best: analyzing massive datasets through artificial intelligence and machine learning. The data collection part is relatively easy. The hard part is transforming all that data into actionable instructions for growers to help bring the 12,000-year-old industry into the 21st century.
Heritable Architecture’s seeds were planted by founder and CEO, Brad Zamft. Brad Zamft, a physics PhD, was a fellow and program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He then spent a year working as chief scientific officer for a venture-backed company called TL Biolabs. Eight months later, in late 2018, Zamft joined Google X, quickly becoming the project lead of what would become Heritable.
Image Credits:
Heritable Agriculture
“I was given broad purview to work on whatever I wanted, as long as it could scale to a Google-size business,” Zamft tells TechCrunch. “That was our mandate. We did a very good job of moving through the gauntlet that is Google X.” We did a great job moving through Google X’s gauntlet. The models were tested with thousands of plants grown in a “specialized chamber” at X headquarters. The researchers also conducted field work at sites in California, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.
The company has no plans to explore mutagenesis, a GMO process that utilizes either chemicals or radiation to create crop mutations. Zamft adds, however, that CRISP-fueled gene editing will eventually play a role in making plants “programmable.” For now, however, Heritable is focused on more conventional methods.“We’re not developing gene-edited plants, and genetic modification is not on our roadmap,” says Zamft. “Gene editing may eventually come, but we’re seeing a huge, unmet need for identifying what to breed and then doing better breeding — crossing a mother and father plant, not using the biotechnology to actually develop the
.”
Image Credits:
Heritable Agriculture
The executive adds that the team is most immediately focused on commercializing the technology. Zamft didn’t reveal any specific dates or commercial partners. He did mention, however, Heritable raised a seed-round, which included FTW Ventures Mythos Ventures and SVG Ventures. [crop]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. Astro Teller is the head of the lab at the corporate incubator, which has been more aggressive in spinning off companies such as Heritable.
