Stories of Activate Fellows and alumni turning scientific breakthroughs into hard-tech impact.
“Plants power half of global GDP, directly or indirectly, and provide enormous ecosystem value that doesn’t get measured in dollar signs. And yet, 40% of plants are on the verge of extinction,” says Ashley Beckwith (Foray Bioscience, Cohort 2022).
What if we could not only slow that loss, but reverse it?
Foray Bioscience is building the toolkit to do just that. The company grows plant products without the plants, starting from a single cell instead of a seed, and uses predictive AI technology to shortcut plant growth.
The result is harvest-free plant products, and a way to regenerate species faster than nature can on its own—even bringing species back from the verge of extinction. Applications range from resilient crops, to conservation and reforestation, to consumer products like lab-grown Christmas trees. And Foray’s new knowledge-sharing platform, Pando, opens this toolkit to the entire plant science community.
Saving the planet’s plant biodiversity is a highly collaborative, multi-sector effort, and Foray’s newest tool reflects that. Pando is the world’s largest knowledge base for in vitro plant biology, designed to accelerate plant science across agriculture, bioengineering, biomanufacturing, academia, and conservation. Launched earlier this year, it already has 190+ users in 15+ countries—including Tufts University, which alone brings data on 1,022 species to the platform.
Behind the scenes, Foray is developing predictive tools that will soon be added to Pando. Beckwith says these off-the-shelf predictive capabilities will “save years or decades in the translation of solutions from lab to field.”
Beckwith is proud of what her cross-disciplinary team has been able to accomplish. What started as a one-person company is now a 12-person team spanning plant biology, AI and machine learning science, computational biology, process engineering and manufacturing, and operations.
“Already they've been able to produce a number of world firsts—from fabricated seeds in species that have never been studied before, to novel bioproduction processes for harvest-free fragrances or fibers, to new genomic validation pipelines,” says Beckwith.
“I think it just goes to show when you bring together brilliant, naturally curious and humble people, and they're oriented and passionate about a singular goal, they really can change the world.”
We caught up with Beckwith about Foray’s exciting milestones since her time as an Activate Fellow and what’s next on the journey to reimagine plant production.
Why do we need fabricated seeds?
Right now we're dealing with massive seed bottlenecks, from the reforestation space to specialty agriculture, where very slow seed production is stalling the deployment of new resilient crop varieties into the world.
If we know that a parent plant—an American chestnut, for example—is blight-resistant, and we want to create more blight-resistant offspring, a natural seed production process will generate many seeds that are not blight-resistant. It’s a lottery. And it takes 10, 15, 20 years for plant varieties to grow to maturity and then start producing seed in the first place.
With our fabricated seed process, we're able to create the seed volumes we need, at the timescales we need, in order to get these plants out into the world many years or decades faster than would otherwise be possible. We’re making seeds where no seeds currently exist and generating plants with known genetics.
With our fab seed process, we're able to create the seed volumes we need, at the timescales we need, in order to get these plants out into the world many years or decades faster than would otherwise be possible.
How does the process work, and how close are you to real-world deployment?
We're excited that our first seeds have now been shipped to an external customer site and are successfully growing at our partner nursery.
We're preparing this process for our many active seed contracts. We’re working on the American chestnut tree, other chestnut hybrid varieties, hazelnut varieties, and more forest tree species. We've built lab-grown Christmas trees and other conifers that we've grown from single cells.
This marks the opening of the floodgates for our fabricated seed work. We’re graduating from internal validation and starting to actually deploy into the real world.
Is there one seed that was particularly tricky that you finally conquered?
There was very little prior research on red spruce, so this was a particularly tricky plant species that we've now taken end-to-end in this process, and we have very cute little trees growing.
How do you choose which species to bring back from extinction?
When we're de-extincting, we look at what's still relevant in ecosystems today. So we primarily look at recently extinct species, and then we look to leverage resources like conserved seeds that exist in herbaria. We’ve been working with some non-profit partners to recover certain extinct species to the landscape in California, for example.
When we're de-extincting, we look at what's still relevant in ecosystems today.
What does the world look like in ten years if Foray is successful?
I truly believe that we're laying the foundation for a new structure for exchanging knowledge and building predictive tools that can accelerate the path to market for new resilient crop varieties, new harvest-free production solutions, scalable seed supply chains, and de-extinction of plant species.
What milestone would have taken longer without Activate?
Our technology has a huge range of options in terms of deployment and potential markets. With Activate, we had the time and support to be able to investigate many different possible paths in great detail and rule out a lot of them. I think that was an important and maybe underappreciated step that Activate enabled us to take: it wasn’t just figuring out where we were going to go as a business, but figuring out where we weren’t. When you're talking about any plant product in the world, that's a big space to investigate. So just being able to sift through a vast amount of information in a systematic way helped us determine a really strong foundation and path forward for our business.
What's the most important thing that you've learned about yourself as a founder?
First, when you’re out in the world, you perceive certain walls or bounds or constraints to be there. But I’ve found that if you actually try to push on that wall, you might find out that it doesn't actually exist. You have more power than you realize to dictate the situation you're operating within. That has been one really empowering learning as a founder.
The other thing has just been growing from a scientist into an entrepreneur and learning to speak both languages. As a scientist and engineer, I like to speak with certainty. I like to have proven something before I talk about it. As a leader of a startup organization, I have to talk about the future that we are going to build that doesn't exist yet.
That was hard at the beginning. It takes reps to build that confidence. But the longer we've been operating and the more that we set these really ambitious goals and actually hit them—because we have an incredible team oriented in the right way with the right resources—that gives me conviction about the direction we’re going and allows me to trust my intuition a little bit more every day.
What advice would you give someone standing where you were when you first applied to Activate, especially another woman founder?
Don't undersell yourself and don't count yourself out before giving yourself the chance to succeed. There were times at the beginning of this journey when I didn't value myself and what we were building enough, and that impacted some of my early decisions. I've learned that lesson now, not to undervalue what I'm bringing to the table. If I could, I would go back and just remove that doubt from my otherwise rational decision-making processes.
I’ve learned that there are many people out there operating without that impostor syndrome voice, or they’re not listening to it, and they’re not any better equipped than you are, right? They’re just not holding themselves back.
Who should connect with you right now?
We’re continuing to build partnerships and our pipeline for seed production. Right now our capacity for seed contracts is filling up for the next year, but we do have some room still.
A lot of our focus today is also on bringing Pando to the world. Plant scientists working with plants in labs across agriculture, industry, agriculture, bioengineering, biomanufacturing, conservation, academia: Pando is for you.
Our prediction features are getting increasingly sophisticated. We haven’t released them on the Pando website yet, but we’re validating them in-house and releasing a paper soon about our early modeling approach.
The more people that participate in this community-building and knowledge-sharing opportunity, the better these systems and tools become.