A tree is just cells that agreed to grow in a particular order
Here is a fact about wood that is either obvious or slightly unsettling depending on how much you think about it: a tree is made of cells, and those cells contain, in principle, all the instructions for being wood. You do not strictly need the tree. You need the cells, and you need to convince them to grow into the shape and material you want. This is very hard, which is why we have spent several thousand years just cutting down the trees instead. Foray Bioscience thinks the hard version is worth doing anyway.
Foray, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, grows plants and plant products from single cells. The company's framing, from founder Ashley Beckwith, is that you "build products like wood from the cell up instead of extracting." That covers wood-like material with controllable properties, but also molecules, and - the part that sounds like science fiction until you sit with it - cultivated seeds. The pitch is that a great deal of what we harvest from plants could instead be manufactured, harvest-free, from the cellular level up.
The reason this is a company and not a lab curiosity is that Beckwith spent her PhD at MIT (SM '18, PhD '22) and a scholarship at Draper Laboratory working out foundational approaches to plant-based materials, in, of all places, the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She founded Foray in February 2022. The engineering pedigree turns out to matter, because Foray's actual insight is less about biology than about search.
We build products like wood from the cell up instead of extracting.
The bottleneck isn't the biology. It's the map.
Suppose you want to grow a specific plant product from cells. You have to pick a growth medium, a temperature, a set of hormones and their concentrations, timing, mechanical conditions, and so on. Foray says a single product can involve more than 50 variables. That is a combinatorial nightmare. Explore it one experiment at a time and you will run out of career before you run out of combinations. And crucially, what works for one species tells you frustratingly little about the next.
This is the thing Foray is really building around. The company treats plant cell culture as a mapping problem - a vast, mostly unexplored territory where you know your starting point (a cell) and your destination (a product), and the middle is fog. Their answer is software.
Pando
An intelligent R&D workspace for plant biology, described as a "Google Maps for plant growth." It uses AI and proprietary experimental data to predict growth protocols and route researchers through those 50+ variables. Launched publicly in 2026.
Cell Biomanufacturing
Grows harvest-free plant materials, molecules, and cultivated seeds from single cells - wood-like material with tunable properties, without logging or traditional cultivation.
R&D Roadmaps
Works with companies, nurseries, and conservationists to design R&D roadmaps and commercialization strategies for plant cell biomanufacturing across species.
Genetic Banking
A future system to store at-risk plants as cells and regrow them on demand - conservation, and even "de-extinction," reframed as a manufacturing output.
Pando works like a Google Maps for plant growth.
Why the software is called Pando
Pando is the name of a famous grove of quaking aspens in Utah that is, genetically, a single organism - thousands of trunks sharing one root system, one of the largest and oldest living things on Earth. Naming your plant-growth routing engine after it is a good joke and a good thesis at once: the trees you see are the interface; the thing that actually matters is the connected system underneath. Foray is betting the underneath is where the value is.
There is a reason the "operating system" language keeps appearing. Beckwith has said the five-year goal is to "be the operating system for all of plant science" - to make it possible to create any product from a single plant cell. That is a deliberately unreasonable target. Unreasonable targets are useful mainly for the direction they point, and this one points at infrastructure: not one hero product, but the layer everyone else builds on.
The stakes, stated plainly
Roughly 45% of plant species face some extinction risk, even as demand for plant products keeps rising. Those two curves point in opposite directions, and the traditional answer - grow more, harvest more - has limits and costs. Foray's proposition is that some meaningful fraction of what we take from plants could be manufactured instead, and that the same cell-culture toolkit that makes harvest-free wood can also bank endangered species and speed up crop improvement by years.
Beckwith has been candid that this cross-disciplinary shape - part manufacturing, part biology, part conservation - made fundraising harder, because it does not fit a tidy investor category. The comparison she draws is to lab-grown meat and seafood: same rebellion against extraction, different underlying science. Investors eventually showed up. A $3 million seed round in 2024, led by ReGen Ventures with The Engine Ventures and others, brought total funding to roughly $3.875 million.
The chestnut, as proof of concept
The most concrete thing Foray has pointed to is a partnership with the nursery West Coast Chestnut to deploy a more disease-resistant version of the American chestnut - a tree that once filled forests across the eastern United States before blight nearly erased it. If Foray can help grow and propagate a resistant version, restoration becomes something closer to a manufacturing pipeline than a decades-long wait. It is a small, specific, checkable claim, which is exactly what you want from a company whose broader ambitions are enormous.