Biographica, the UK crop-design startup that raised £7 million ($9.5 million) in a Faber VC-led seed round, has signed a partnership with Dutch genome editing specialist Hudson River Biotechnology to deliver edited commercial crop varieties starting with tomatoes.

The alliance gives plant breeders a single pipeline from gene-target identification through transformation and regeneration, said Biographica cofounder Dominic Hall, PhD. "Hudson River is one of very few companies that can edit crops as difficult as strawberry, transgene-free and at a scale our clients depend on," Hall told AgFunderNews.

Under the arrangement, customers stay Hudson River's clients while Biographica's predictive platform ranks candidate genes for a given trait and designs the edits. Hudson River applies the edits through its BioMaas editing and single-cell regeneration workflow.

What problem does the partnership solve?

The collaboration targets trait work that conventional discovery tools cannot crack. Hall, who cofounded Biographica in 2022 with Cecily Price, identified three drivers:

• Exhausted obvious genetic targets
• Insufficient data to identify a good target
• Existing patents blocking the path

"It's a case of bring us your most difficult trait problems," Hall said. Customers may lack the data to solve a trait themselves, or they may be "blocked by existing patents and they need to find a way to generate traits that go around that."

Commercial terms split upstream costs and downstream upside between the two firms. Customer relationships stay with Hudson River, Hall said.

Why does the computational step matter?

Most breeding programs still rely on Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) and Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL) mapping to find genes linked to traits. Hall said those tools prove correlation, not causation, and do not rank genetic hits by editability.

Biographica's platform layers multi-modal machine learning on foundation models trained on gene-gene and gene-trait interactions to predict which genes most drive a target trait. Experimental feedback retrains the models continuously. That ranking matters because editing budgets are finite and breeders want the fewest side effects per dollar.

Disease resistance draws the strongest incoming signal, Hall said, with crop quality and nutrition queued behind it.

What makes the editing side different?

Hudson River's reputation rests on crops that resist standard transformation pipelines. BioMaas combines editing with single-cell regeneration. The firm counts strawberry — a notoriously recalcitrant species for transgene-free edits — among its repertoire.

Hudson River CSO Lotte Westerhof said the partnership clears traits that breeding programs have missed. "By bringing our capabilities together, we want to move genome editing beyond the obvious targets and unlock traits that breeding has not yet been able to crack," Westerhof said.

Can susceptibility genes become the bigger prize?

Beyond standard knockouts, Biographica models how edits could shift gene expression across tissues or environmental conditions. That capability lets the partners work on susceptibility genes — the loci pathogens exploit — without the yield drag that full knockouts leave behind.

"Can we modulate expression of these genes in specific contexts so we can reduce the susceptibility of the plant without having a yield penalty? That's a core focus area for us at the moment," Hall said.

Biographica also runs in-house discovery alongside its BASF work and other large-client engagements. Hall said deeper trait bets are guided by market pull, with disease resistance leading the queue and crop quality and nutrition positioned to follow as foundation-model confidence in subtle expression edits grows.