Heritable Agriculture, an AI-powered crop improvement start-up spun out of Google X, has secured a $4.98 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to fund its 'Joint AI-driven Smallholder Omics aNalytics' (JASON) initiative. The project aims to develop climate-resilient crops for smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) using artificial intelligence combined with genomic 'omics' technologies. Heritable Agriculture will establish a cloud-based AI genomics engine to accelerate gene discovery and breeding cycles, identifying targets for crops that can withstand extreme drought, heat and other climate stressors. “This project allows us to dramatically accelerate the discovery and deployment of climate-resilient crops,” said Tim Beissinger, CTO of Heritable Agriculture. Heritable Agriculture’s AI-driven platform mines both ancient and modern crop genomes to identify functional genes that improve stress tolerance.