Heritable
"Programming" plants to be more resilient and sustainable
Heritable Agriculture is an independent company focused on advancing plant breeding and biotechnology to make the world’s food and agricultural systems more resilient. While incubating at the Moonshot Factory, the team created a machine learning platform that can uncover critical new details about how plants grow and how to optimize their growth. Today Heritable Agriculture and its partners help farmers and agriculture companies better understand the genomes, environments, and management practices they will need to yield the healthiest, most productive, and most resilient crops
Brad Zamft, CEO and co-founder of Heritable Agriculture
The Irony of Agriculture
Agriculture is a modern miracle—our food systems have been able to sustain the world’s ever-growing population because plants are solar-powered, carbon negative, self-assembling machines that feed on sunlight and water. But ironically, even though agriculture is the only industry that’s fundamentally rooted in nature, it’s one of the most environmentally-taxing. Agriculture accounts for nearly half of habitable land use, a quarter of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and 70 percent of the world’s groundwater withdrawals. The Heritable Agriculture team set out to address the challenges facing the agriculture industry by harnessing the diversity of our natural systems.
To keep pace with the world’s growing population, we need smart, sustainable ways to increase food production. Yet the current pace and cost of crop improvement puts our global food systems at risk and limits the growth of the agriculture industry
- Brad Zamft, CEO and Co-founder of Heritable
Parsing Plant Data in a New Way
Although scientists have access to a wealth of biological information, this data is messy and hard to parse. The Heritable team decided to tackle this data challenge first, asking what if they could use that information to breed plants that could deliver higher crop yields, improve their nutrition, and boost their resilience?
The team created a machine learning platform that can uncover critical new details about how plants grow. The team used advanced computational biology techniques to decode the natural adaptations in plant biodiversity, developing models that can identify and understand the function of specific elements of plant genomes. By understanding those genomes, the crops can then be bred with climate-friendly traits. For example increased yields, lower water requirements, and higher carbon storage capacity in roots and soil.
Making Plants “Programmable”
To validate the models, the team grew thousands of plants inside a specialized growth chamber at the Moonshot Factory’s labs. The chamber was fitted with an automated photography system that captured hourly images of test plants. This allowed the team to measure growth, track whether it’s possible to accurately predict when a plant may flower, and understand how specific changes might affect budding time. The team also spent time out in the field, working with partners and conducting studies across a variety of agricultural sites in the U.S.
From their initial tests, the team saw a path forward to using its technology for identifying and predicting genetic determinants of plant traits like color, taste, water and nitrogen requirements, and even the ability to store carbon below ground. Heritable then developed an AI platform to make plants programmable, with the goal of delivering higher yields, improved nutrition, better resilience to pathogen and climate stress, and faster seed breeding cycles, at lower cost.
While at X, Heritable processed data from 14,000 plant samples taken from field trials in Nebraska, Wisconsin, and California.
Heritable Today
In early 2025, Heritable became an independent company and announced a round of funding led by FTW Ventures, Mythos Ventures, and SVG Ventures. As an independent company, Heritable Agriculture is working to help farmers and agriculture companies better understand the specific genomes of plants that will yield healthy, abundant crops. The team is also exploring the platform’s potential to enable sustainable forestry by re-populating native tree species in deforested areas.
