Rainbow Crops, a next-generation agtech firm, has secured a $7 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to advance breakthrough genetic approaches for bettering crop efficiency underneath excessive warmth and drought. The funding helps Rainbow Crops’ Trait Foundry™ platform and its potential to assist smallholder farmers adapt to escalating local weather pressures.
The funding will speed up work on climate-resilient germplasm, specializing in crops that anchor meals safety throughout weak areas. It goals to generate strong seedling efficiency underneath harsh circumstances, one of many greatest challenges dealing with small-scale growers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Concentrating on crops that feed the world
The analysis effort funded by the Gates Basis will start with corn, sorghum, and rice, three crops central to international meals safety. These staples not solely maintain a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of individuals but additionally underpin rural economies throughout climate-vulnerable geographies.
A core focus of the mission is seedling efficiency, a stage at which warmth and drought can devastate plant institution. By bettering early progress underneath stress, the analysis will generate foundational trait elements that breeders can incorporate into future varieties. The work will produce each scientific insights and sensible trait-building blocks for long-term breeding pipelines.
Rainbow Crops’ expertise has already been validated in corn end-to-end, proving its capability to determine and engineer multiplex genetic traits throughout a number of efficiency indicators.
Constructed on deep scientific roots
Rainbow Crops’ platform is grounded in years of analysis at VIB, the place the core scientific ideas have been developed. The corporate will collaborate intently with the laboratory of Professor Hilde Nelissen, from which the spin-off emerged, in addition to with the VIB Transformation Facility and the VIB Agro-Incubator.
The corporate may even work with further business companions to help shared scientific methods and knowledge alternate, an effort supposed to speed up progress throughout the broader agricultural innovation ecosystem.
Based in 2025 as a spin-off from the VIB–UGent Heart for Plant Programs Biology, Rainbow Crops is led by co-founder and CEO Giacomo Bastianelli. The corporate develops climate-resilient, high-performing crop varieties by integrating multiplex enhancing, precision breeding and high-throughput phenotyping.
By specializing in complicated traits that matter most underneath local weather stress, Rainbow Crops goals to assist reshape the way forward for sustainable agriculture, making certain that farmers on the entrance strains of local weather change have crops able to surviving and thriving.
Engineering complicated traits past conventional breeding
Rainbow Crops’ Trait Foundry™ platform operates on the precept that conventional breeding usually struggles with many very important agronomic traits which are ruled not by a single gene however by a number of interacting genes. Drought tolerance, plant vigour, and warmth resilience fall squarely into this class.
To deal with these multi-gene networks, the platform combines multiplex genome enhancing, superior computation, precision breeding and automatic phenotyping. As an alternative of figuring out one promising gene, Trait Foundry™ systematically maps and selects combos of alleles that work collectively to enhance crop efficiency.
This method is designed to ship the form of precision and pace that typical breeding or single-gene modification strategies can’t match. By understanding how completely different alleles work together underneath actual environmental stress, Rainbow Crops goals to develop crop varieties that germinate reliably, set up early and survive the most well liked, driest seasons.
Giacomo Bastianelli, Co-founder and CEO of Rainbow Crops, mentioned, “This grant permits us to additional strengthen our expertise platform and contribute foundational advances that allow extra climate-resilient crops, with relevance to areas most weak to environmental change.”
