Rob Hranac’s career keeps shrinking the object of attention. First came transportation networks spread across cities. Then satellite positioning measured in centimeters. After that, the immense genetic traffic inside a handful of soil. Now, at Loam Bio, he is working with fungi so small they can be delivered with seed, yet ambitious enough to sit inside a global carbon-removal strategy.
The scale has changed. The underlying job has not. Again and again, Hranac has entered businesses built around systems that are consequential, largely invisible and useless to customers until someone translates them into a decision. A road sensor must become a traffic forecast. A satellite signal must become a trustworthy coordinate. Soil DNA must become a planting plan. Carbon stored underground must become a measured outcome that a farmer and a market can both understand.
In July 2026, the San Francisco Bay Area executive became chief executive of Loam Bio, the Australian agricultural biotechnology company founded in Orange, New South Wales. Co-founder Guy Hudson moved to executive chairman. The arrangement says something about the chapter ahead: Loam’s scientific roots and Australian operating base remain in place, while a US-based builder takes responsibility for a wider commercial map.
The engineer who learned to translate
Hranac’s academic path paired electrical and computer engineering at Boston University with civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. It is a useful combination for his later work. One degree asks how information moves through machines. The other asks what machines are doing inside physical systems shared by everyone else.
His early career was rooted in transportation. He wrote software at Cambridge Systematics, led The Open Planning Project, returned to Cambridge Systematics as a senior associate, and became a vice president at Berkeley Transportation Systems. At Iteris, he managed a transportation analytics group and oversaw business development for an integrated software platform. He also served on a Transportation Research Board committee within the National Academies.
Transportation analytics may appear to be a long drive from agricultural biotechnology. In practice, both fields punish abstraction. A technically elegant model earns its keep only when it guides a real choice in a noisy environment. Roads have weather, human behavior and incomplete data. Farms have all three, plus living soil and a narrow calendar.
Centimeters before microbes
In 2016, Hranac joined Swift Navigation as vice president of business development. Swift was making high-accuracy GPS less expensive and more accessible for autonomous vehicles, drones, robotics and precision agriculture. He arrived with more than a decade in software, hardware and professional services, then went on to serve as chief operating officer.
The product dealt in coordinates, but the operating challenge dealt in confidence. A customer building an autonomous machine cannot accept a location that is approximately correct. The measurement has to be precise, available and integrated into a larger system. Hranac’s role stretched across partnerships, customers and the work of scaling a technical platform beyond its inventors.
Colleagues later described him as thoughtful, strategically clear, hard-working and unusually willing to listen. The praise is notable for what it emphasizes: not charisma as theater, but the quieter business of reducing complexity, aligning a team and closing consequential partnerships. Those are helpful habits when the product in question is easy to misunderstand and expensive to deploy badly.
The soil starts talking
Hranac’s move into agriculture became explicit at Pattern Ag, where he served as chief executive from 2020 to 2024. Pattern used soil metagenomics to identify biological patterns linked to crop risks and productivity. Its annual Predictive Ag reports turned an expanding genomic database into practical intelligence for growers. The premise was both scientific and commercial: healthy soil is not merely an environmental virtue; it is productive infrastructure.
That distinction matters. Farmers do not buy climate intention by the acre. They weigh yield, input cost, weather risk and the consequences of being wrong. Pattern’s work tried to turn microbial complexity into specific agronomic signals, including pathogen pressure and soil productivity. Hranac framed the opportunity around sustainability and productivity moving together, not occupying rival columns in a presentation.
In 2022, Pattern announced a $35 million funding round backed by a group that included Continental Grain, The Production Board, Valor Capital Group, Ospraie Ag Science, Founders Fund, iSelect, LAUNCH and The Nature Conservancy. Two years later, Pattern agreed to merge with EarthOptics, pairing its biological analytics with field-based technologies that measured physical soil properties. Hranac said the combination could broaden soil insights and increase the resolution of many analytics by 100 times or more.
Iteris
Swift
Pattern Ag
Lithos
Loam Bio
A brief geological interlude
After serving as chief technology officer of the combined EarthOptics business, Hranac joined Lithos Carbon as chief operating officer. Lithos applies finely ground basalt to farmland to accelerate a natural carbon-removal process called enhanced rock weathering. His stated brief was direct: scale operations across US farmland and build the technology platform needed for much larger deployment.
The move produced a coincidence too tidy to leave buried. Hranac climbs rocks in his free time, including basalt pillars at Vantage, Washington. At Lithos, basalt became an operational material: source it, move it, spread it, measure its effects. “Let’s move some rock!” he wrote when announcing the job. Even climate infrastructure is permitted one good pun.
Lithos added another layer to his agricultural education. Genomics could reveal the soil’s living signals; sensors could characterize its physical properties; enhanced weathering connected farm logistics to geochemistry and carbon markets. The common constraint remained adoption. A carbon-removal pathway spread across farmland has to respect the farm as a business, not treat it as vacant acreage on an atmospheric spreadsheet.
Loam’s microscopic wager
Loam Bio approaches soil carbon through root-associated fungi. Its CarbonBuilder technology is delivered as a biological seed treatment designed to help plants move captured atmospheric carbon into more stable soil pools. Through its SecondCrop programs, the company measures, reports and verifies soil-carbon outcomes for carbon projects.
The method places a vast ambition inside a familiar agricultural action. Seed already passes through a well-established system of production, distribution and planting. A biological treatment can travel through that gate without asking a farmer to invent an entirely new profession. Loam’s task is to prove performance, durability and value with the discipline expected of both an agricultural product and a carbon-removal platform.
When Loam announced Hranac’s appointment, it pointed to products sold on two continents, early US commercial partnerships, patents and the first credits from a project audited under Australia’s Emissions Reduction Fund. Hranac said he had admired the company for years. His reason for joining condensed the thesis: science, a product that delivers for farmers and a climate platform capable of scaling.
The useful middle
There is a temptation in climate technology to divide the cast neatly. Scientists discover. Founders imagine. Operators execute. Farmers adopt. Carbon buyers pay. The field is less orderly. Each group needs enough understanding of the others to spot the weak joint before it breaks.
Hranac has built a career in those joints. His technical education lets him enter the scientific conversation. His business-development years taught him to hear what a customer is actually buying. His executive roles placed him inside financing, hiring, partnerships and the integration work that follows a merger. His agriculture years have made the farm’s constraints difficult to romanticize.
That combination is now being tested across an unusual geography. Loam’s headquarters and research center remain in regional Australia, close to broadacre farming communities. Hranac is based in the United States, where the company is pursuing expansion. Robbie Oppenheimer, promoted to chief operating officer during the transition, remains in Orange. Hudson, as executive chairman, stays involved in strategy, major investor relationships and governance.
What builders can steal
The first lesson is that a career can change industries without discarding its accumulated craft. Hranac did not carry traffic software into a microbiology lab. He carried a way of thinking: measure a complicated physical system, translate the signal, fit the result into a workflow and build trust around the decision.
The second is that distribution belongs inside product design. Centimeter-accurate positioning became useful when it could integrate with machines. Genomic insight became useful when it answered an agronomic question. A carbon-storing fungus becomes commercially relevant when it can move through seed treatment, field operations, measurement and a credible market.
The third is the least fashionable: profitability is part of climate durability. If a product makes a farm stronger, improves the economics of a season or creates a defensible new revenue stream, it has reasons to persist beyond a pilot. Hranac’s public language repeatedly keeps farmer productivity and climate outcomes in the same sentence. The conjunction is the strategy.
At Loam’s August summit in Orange, the new CEO opened a day devoted to farmer value and the company’s direction. It was an early scene in a tenure too new for verdicts. The aspiration, however, is plain. Loam wants to remove atmospheric carbon at enormous scale. Hranac’s work is to help that ambition pass through the narrow, practical aperture of a field, a product and a farmer’s trust.
His career suggests he is comfortable there. The objects may keep getting smaller. The operating question stays stubbornly human: can this clever thing earn a place in the real world?