Pairwise is agriculture's plant CRISPR powerhouse
Success rate in creating targeted crop improvements
Potential products created
Crops edited
Transformations performed
What we do
Unlocking Nature’s full potential
Making food easier to grow and eat
Leading with Science & Purpose
Plant genome editing: accelerated breeding for agriculture
Pioneering CRISPR innovation
An early innovator in applying CRISPR in agriculture, Pairwise is creating results. We built our Fulcrum™ platform to make high-value traits in crops, and it is delivering for us and for our licensees.
After demonstrating a trait in one crop, we translate it to many through licensing. To maximize the speed and impact of our work we have many collaborations across nonprofits, academia, global agriculture and CPG companies.
Breakthroughs Build
With each breakthrough we build on what nature already does well, adding to our knowledge and capabilities that makes the next project a little bit faster. Ultimately, we accelerate the development of more productive, efficient, and appealing crops.
From Lab to Life
The real-world benefits of plant gene editing are already here: extended flowering time, compact plant size for higher density planting, seedless convenience, and better taste – making food easier to grow and more enjoyable to eat. With a partnership-first model, we work with global collaborators and licensees to bring these innovations into the world and onto fields, plates, and markets.
A trusted collaborator across the agriculture ecosystem
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Our investors
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Insights
Pairwise today announced it has been named No. 1 on the FoodTech 500 (2025) by Forward Fooding. The annual ranking identifies the most innovative global companies at the convergence of food, technology, and sustainability, selected from over 1,200 submissions spanning 87 countries.
"The FoodTech 500 recognizes companies solving real problems in the food system, and that's precisely what Pairwise is doing. We're bringing the most powerful crop improvement tools in history to the crops and partners that need them most," said Tom Adams, CEO of Pairwise.
To read more, visit: https://forwardfooding.com/foodtech500/company/pairwise/
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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/
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“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.
Pairwise is pioneering the application of CRISPR technology in food and agriculture.
