January 2026
Gates Foundation Awards $4.98 Million to Heritable Agriculture for AI-Driven Climate-Resilient Crop Genomics
In January 2026, the Gates Foundation awarded $4.98 million to Heritable Agriculture — an AI crop improvement company spun from Google X — for the JASON project, deploying a cloud-based AI genomics engine to identify drought and heat tolerance gene targets in staple crops for LMIC smallholder farmers. JASON aims to compress conventional crop breeding timelines and deliver climate-resilient germplasm faster to the nearly 2 billion people whose incomes depend on smallholder agriculture.
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