Pairwise is agriculture's plant CRISPR powerhouse

Pairwise today announced it has been named No. 26 on TIME Magazine’s America’s Top GreenTech Companies of 2026. The ranking recognizes the top 250 U.S.-based companies shaping the future of sustainable business and environmental innovation. Statista gathered and scrutinized data from over 3,500 companies, and awarded the top 250 based on three evaluation criteria:

Positive Environmental Impact: To assess a company’s positive environmental impact, Statista partnered with The Upright Project to quantify the holistic impact of a company’s product and service portfolio, including its alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs).

Financial Strength: For the evaluation of financial strength, Statista analyzed revenue, employee and funding data, obtained from publicly available sources like annual reports, company websites, through media monitoring, and via databases.

Innovation Drive: For the innovation drive, Statista cooperated with LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions to analyze the quantity and impact of a company’s IP (intellectual property) portfolio.

"Being named to TIME's list is a meaningful recognition of what this team has built," said Tom Adams, CEO of Pairwise. "The opportunity in permanent crops is massive, and Pairwise is demonstrating what becomes possible when the best CRISPR tools, AI and machine learning, and decades of breeding knowledge converge at the same moment. We are driving a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a healthier world by making plants easier to grow and eat, and the moment to do that is now."

To read the full list, visit: https://time.com/7344228/americas-top-greentech-companies-of-2025/

“You don't notice the seeds in a blackberry until you’ve tried a seedless one,” says Tom Adams, the boss of Pairwise, a biotech company in North Carolina that is working on the first iteration of such a fruit. Gene-edited blackberries are not technically without seeds. Rather, as with seedless grapes, those seeds are so small and soft as to be unnoticeable. Late last year Pairwise announced a joint venture with a fruit-breeding company to develop stoneless cherries, following the success of conventionally bred seedless grapes, watermelons and easy-peel mandarins. It is only a matter of time until more challenging fruits are similarly eviscerated.

Over thousands of years of domestication, humans have moulded fruit to their liking. Today’s peaches are 16 times the size of their ancient ancestors. The 1,200 varieties of watermelon bear little resemblance to the pale and pip-filled gourd that preceded them. Cultivated fruits also tend to be sweeter. (So much so that some zoos have stopped feeding them to animals.) Some modern fruits, however, achieve their sweetness by lowering acidity and bitterness rather than piling in extra sugar.

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Pairwise, a global innovator in agriculture, today announced a licensing agreement with Wild Bioscience Ltd. (Wild Bio) granting the company access to Pairwise’s Fulcrum® genome editing tools. Under the agreement, Wild Bio will integrate Fulcrum® tools into its research and development pipeline to design and develop more resilient crops for a changing climate.

Wild Bio applies artificial intelligence and evolutionary biology to identify and design beneficial plant traits, pairing computational discovery with commercial genetics to accelerate crop improvement. Through this collaboration, Wild Bio will leverage Pairwise’s CRISPR-based genome editing tools to translate AI-driven trait insights into elite crop varieties. The license applies to a range of row crops that Wild Bio operates across for its yield enhancement and carbon removal projects.  

“At Wild Bio, our goal is to develop resilient crops for a changing planet – sustainably improving yields while reducing agricultural footprints,” said Dr. Ross Hendron, CEO of Wild Bioscience. “We focus on rapidly translating AI-driven trait discovery into elite crop genetics spanning multiple species. Pairwise’s plant-optimized genome editing approach expands our toolkit for efficiently deploying our traits across crops.”  

“Pairwise built Fulcrum® to enable innovators across agriculture to realize the full potential of precision breeding,” said Dr. Tom Adams, CEO of Pairwise. “By licensing our platform to partners like Wild Bio, we are extending access to advanced editing tools that help accelerate trait development, and by extension, our mission to make a healthier world, by making plants easier to grow and eat.”

The Pairwise Fulcrum® platform includes proprietary gene editing tools, enzymes, and trait libraries that enable precise genetic changes, unlocking plants’ inherent potential and significantly accelerating the development of impactful crop traits compared to traditional breeding methods. The licensing will cover research and commercial purposes.

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About Wild Bioscience

Wild Bioscience Ltd. is an agricultural biotechnology company applying evolutionary biology and artificial intelligence to develop resilient, high-performance crops for a changing planet. Founded in 2021 as a spin-out from the University of Oxford, the company was established by Dr. Ross Hendron and Prof. Steve Kelly and is backed by the Ellison Institute Oxford, Oxford Science Enterprises, Braavos Capital, and the University of Oxford. For more information, visit www.wildbioscience.com.

About Pairwise

Pairwise is agriculture’s gene editing powerhouse, building a healthier world through partnership and plant innovation. Co-founded by early pioneers of CRISPR, Pairwise’s Fulcrum® Platform accelerates the development of climate-resilient, nutritious, and sustainable crops. As a trusted partner to global industry leaders and nonprofit institutions, Pairwise helps breeders move faster while transforming food and agriculture for farmers, consumers, and the planet. Founded in 2017 and based in Durham, NC, Pairwise is committed to delivering innovation that makes food easier to grow and better to eat. For more information, visit www.pairwise.com.

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