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Heritable Agriculture’s Googlification of Agriculture, Olipop and David’s Biotech Lemonade Stand, Arc Institute’s Evo2 is the GPT of bio, Maverick Metals raises $19 million, A poet's way of growing

Heritable Agriculture’s Googlification of Agriculture

Born at Google X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory, Heritable’s mission is to dramatically reduce the cost and time of plant breeding (not gene editing just yet), starting with under-optimized crops like berries, avocados, oats, barley, rye, bok choi, and chickpeas, as well as forest trees like loblolly pine. Their customers include Italian strawberry producer CIV and forestry supplier ArborGen.

Traditional breeding relies on plant geneticists’ choice of genes and plants to cross, field trials that can take decades, and uncontrollable environmental variables. Heritable uses AI to analyze and match googles of transcriptional, weather, and phenotypic data at an in-vitro or in seedling stage, to select the most impactful genes for a desired trait, under certain environmental conditions.

They’ve developed systems to collect and freeze hundreds of samples in liquid nitrogen and have processed data from 14,000 samples spanning seven different crops, which may include plant height, biomass, bud density, leaf shape, drought and insect resistance, number of kernels, bitterness, and photosynthetic capacity.

Olipop and David’s Biotech Lemonade Stand

A few years ago, I thought my life’s mission was to start a David kind of biotech startup, one that would defeat not one but one thousand Goliaths. Today, I think it wouldn’t be so bad if v1 David, one that was perhaps as simple as a lemonade stand, became friends with one of those Goliath guys — LifeSci VC and others have been sharing crispy pharma M&A charts for years but… what about non-pharma, science-driven, profitable companies?

OLIPOP caught my attention as a brand even before their most direct competitor poppi got famously acquired by PepsiCo for $1.9B a few months ago — Both OLI and poppi are “functional beverages” packaged in colorful cans that claim to take care of your microbiota, have low-sugar content. Maybe because of the myriad of pages explaining the benefits of each of their prebiotics, OLI gives more “the real thing” vibes — A guilt-free, pleasure-maximizing product for the conscious-maximalist.