Foray Bioscience, a company sowing the seeds for plantless plant products, announced it has raised $3 million in seed funding led by ReGen Ventures. And additional investors include The Engine Ventures, Susquehanna Sustainable Investments, Understorey Ventures, Superorganism, and others.
The seed funding follows a pre-seed round and brings the company’s total to $3.875 million. And Foray will deploy the funds to expand its predictive plant cell culture platform, launch product development engagements with select partners, and expand its Boston-based team.
Plants play a major role in ecosystem stabilization, carbon storage, and climate management. However, nearly 40% of assessed plant species are under threat of extinction. The world lost over 16 million acres of forest in 2022 — an area larger than West Virginia.
New tools are needed to ensure continued access to critical plant-sourced goods while replenishing these valuable natural resources. Foray’s goal is to unlock biomanufacturing for plant-based industries to protect and restore natural ecosystems. The company’s novel technology utilizes plant cells cultivated outside the plant to produce a variety of goods more efficiently, from molecules to materials and seeds.
Dr. Ashley Beckwith launched Foray after developing foundational approaches in plant-based materials during her PhD at MIT and scholarship at Draper Laboratory. And Foray also recently appointed two members to its leadership team: Nico Hawley-Weld as Head of Research & Development, and Alex Grant as Head of Operations. Earlier this spring, Foray welcomed a Principal Scientist for Machine Learning and Computational Biology, positioning itself to expand its platform capabilities.
KEY QUOTES:
“We believe plant cell culture is a critical and underutilized tool for plant conservation, restoration, and production. With Foray’s technology, our goal is to make biomanufacturing accessible across species and applications by significantly reducing the barriers to entry. Our platform is powered by a first-of-a-kind predictive database and advanced optimization strategies that will improve success rates, shorten development timelines and make plant cell culture accessible to the 99% of species that remain largely unexplored in biomanufacturing today.”
– Dr. Ashley Beckwith, founder and CEO of Foray
“Foray is reimagining the manufacturing of plant products. The company’s versatile approach will build much-needed resiliency into our plant supply chains and solve for persistent seed deficits in the reforestation sector. We’re thrilled to support such an innovative technology and team, particularly as environmental preservation becomes increasingly urgent.”
– Parker Hughes, Principal at ReGen Ventures and Foray Board member
