Foray Bioscience

Founder & Key Leadership: Ashley Beckwith, Alex Grant & Nico Hawley-Weld
Founding: 2022
Mission: Building lasting access to plants and plant products by redefining the way we grow
Employees: 13
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & ~$4M raised
Investors: ReGen Ventures, Engine Ventures, Superorganism, Susequenna Sustainable Investments, Understorey, Tet Ventures, SBXi
Key Customers: Coming Soon!
Valuation (estimated): <$50M (assuming average equity dilution in the Seed fundraise)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Foray Bioscience is building a technology driven platform to redefine how plants are grown, designing new ways of growing plants and plant products from the cell up. Maybe the solutions to our problems start in a petri dish, with less acreage and more API calls.

Ashley Beckwith got her Masters at MIT as a mechanical engineer before traveling to France to work on a permaculture farm ahead of her PhD studies. Seeing how plants functioned (and failed) in the real world, she dedicated her doctoral research to understanding how regenerative approaches designed with human health in mind might also be used to improve the health of our plants.

Over more than a decade working with cell culture at the intersection of biology, materials, and engineering, Ashley has built a practice centered on working with living systems rather than extracting from them. Through this work, she developed a hands-on understanding of how plant cells respond to nutrients, environmental conditions, and growth factors – learning how they can be guided in the lab toward different outcomes…without harvesting entire plants.

By growing plant products from single cells, creating just “what is needed and nothing more”, she laid a roadmap to support a new method of ecosystem regeneration. After participating in the Activate Fellowship, Nucleate, and The Engine’s Blueprint program Ashley began to productize her research into a technology company as she realized the full scope of the opportunity. 

40% of plant species are on their way to extinction (src). Plants are the foundation of roughly $44T (!) of Mother Nature dependent GDP. The construction, agriculture, and food & beverage industries alone represent approximately $8T (src). Are you eating what we’re serving?

Today, humanity’s approach to maintaining this (fragile) status quo is to grow more plants in the hope that we can harvest more plants. But will that model scale in an era of increasing consumption and climate change? Eh. We desperately need a new production paradigm, where we can grow exactly what we need, while preserving (and hopefully rebuilding) the ecosystems these plants come from.

Foray Bioscience is building a data-driven, AI-enabled bioproduction process to produce, preserve, and regenerate the plant products that underpin our global economy. That AI enablement comes from Pando, their software platform that functions like the Google Maps for plant culture – using experimental data and global context to guide researchers from biological starting point to outcome in the most efficient way possible, making plant culture R&D more predictable and successful.

Ok, so how does this all work? 

Foray’s bioproduction methodology leverages machine learning models which examine the phylogenetic relationships between plant species (i.e. shared ancestry). Alongside a regimented production pipeline, Foray has ingested the global research corpus on plant cell and tissue culture to connect the dots from “all the plant knowledge that has come before” to help predict functional protocols and shrink development timelines. While plant cell & tissue culture technology has been around for decades, the field’s approach has traditionally been delivered through apprenticeships, notebooks, PDFs, and other artistic methodologies.

Pando is now being increasingly externalized for the benefit of the broader field. It can help design experiments, capture & structure outcomes, and share context across labs, institutions, and use cases. 17 organizations (academic institutions, botanical gardens, plant & tissue culture labs, etc.) are already in the private beta and full access will be rolling out more publicly in Q1 of 2026.

This team conducts its own research, paired at the project level with partner organizations, to build fabricated seed technologies for customers or help with de-extinction efforts through public & private partnerships. For example, Foray has been tasked with helping preserve a species of mint that once grew in California alongside the California Institute of Biodiversity and Cal Alive. Other partners include a multinational packaging company developing “bio-better” fibers and a mining company revegetating their production sites, further proving out multiple commercial verticals.

With no central database for plant information, there’s a real opportunity to break down siloes and build a general-purpose engine for plant biology. Foray is already driving increased success rates in the lab, from the “traditional” success rate of ~40% to 80%+. Time to initiate cultures has dropped in half, from 6-12 months to roughly 3 months. This is a strong signal that standardized, AI-enabled experimentation can fundamentally shift the economics of plant R&D.

In 2025, the Foray team tripled in size to 13 people. They added multiple commercial partners across different bioproduction modalities and built the full external customer application in Pando. In 2026 they’ll be scaling their platform, building a GTM engine, and adding software engineers & biology roles to expand their bioproduction programs. Foray sits at the intersection of biotech, climatetech, and advanced computing. It’s a perfect Boston combination, housed at The Engine, alongside a community of builders doing hard things in tough tech!

Operators to Know:

• Alex Grant, COO
• Nico Hawley-Weld, CTO
• Rest of the team here!

Key Roles To Be Hired:

• Coming Soon!

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

• What are the key strategic initiatives for Foray Bioscience in 2026?
• What are the key milestones to continue to drive the technology & platform forward?
• What is the long term vision for the company?
• What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2026 // teams that need the most help?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Foray Bioscience you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring the world of plants into the age of AI. All of humanity applauds your efforts. See you around town!