plant-breeding
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Monrovia
Monrovia is a 100-year-old American plant company founded in 1926 that grows and sells premium ornamental and edible plants. Now headquartered in Dayton, Oregon, it is the nation's largest grower of premium shrubs, perennials and trees by sales and container acreage, offering more than 4,000 varieties - including 250-plus exclusives - grown across a network of regional nurseries. Under the 'Grow Beautifully' banner, Monrovia partners with top breeders and plant hunters worldwide, pioneered container-grown plants, and sells roughly 22 million plants a year through independent garden centers and its own e-commerce site.
Meiogenix
Meiogenix is a French-American agricultural biotech company that re-engineers one of nature's oldest tricks - meiotic recombination, the gene-shuffling that happens when plants make seeds. Instead of editing single genes like CRISPR, its proprietary SpiX and dCas9-SPO11 platforms steer where chromosomes cross over, unlocking 'cold' regions of the genome that conventional breeding can never reach. The result: breeders can mix desirable traits, break unwanted linkage, and shrink crop development cycles from 10-plus years to as few as three, all without introducing foreign DNA. Founded in 2010 as a spin-off from Institut Curie and INRA, the company targets the $50B+ commercial seed market across corn, wheat, rice, tomato and soybean, and licenses its technology to partners including Bayer.
Kathryn Cook
Kathryn Cook is the CEO and co-founder of NuCicer, a Davis, California agtech and food-tech company breeding chickpeas with up to 75% more protein than ordinary varieties. A former Boeing materials engineer and Facebook technical program manager, she left big tech to commercialize 35 years of her father's chickpea genetics research at UC Davis, applying machine learning and data analytics to plant breeding. NuCicer has raised roughly $23 million in total funding, planted across multiple US states, and aims to cut the cost of plant protein in half.
Ricardo Alba
Ricardo Garcia de Alba is the President and CEO of Meiogenix, an agriculture biotech company whose chromosome-editing platform speeds up the way crops naturally reshuffle their own DNA. A chemical engineer from Mexico City turned global ag executive, he spent 15 years at Corteva Agriscience helping build and launch the Enlist weed-control system before taking the helm at Meiogenix in 2024. He pairs hard science and commercial scale with a long habit of community and STEM service - and keeps bees on the side.