Rainbow Crops, a next-generation agtech company, has secured a $7 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to advance breakthrough genetic approaches for improving crop performance under extreme heat and drought. The investment supports Rainbow Crops’ Trait Foundry™ platform and its potential to help smallholder farmers adapt to escalating climate pressures.
The funding will accelerate work on climate-resilient germplasm, focusing on crops that anchor food security across vulnerable regions. It aims to generate robust seedling performance under harsh conditions, one of the biggest challenges facing small-scale growers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
Targeting crops that feed the world
The research effort funded by the Gates Foundation will begin with corn, sorghum, and rice, three crops central to global food security. These staples not only sustain hundreds of millions of people but also underpin rural economies across climate-vulnerable geographies.
A core focus of the project is seedling performance, a stage at which heat and drought can devastate plant establishment. By improving early growth under stress, the research will generate foundational trait components that breeders can incorporate into future varieties. The work will produce both scientific insights and practical trait-building blocks for long-term breeding pipelines.
Rainbow Crops’ technology has already been validated in corn end-to-end, proving its ability to identify and engineer multiplex genetic traits across multiple performance indicators.
Built on deep scientific roots
Rainbow Crops’ platform is grounded in years of research at VIB, where the core scientific concepts were developed. The company will collaborate closely with the laboratory of Professor Hilde Nelissen, from which the spin-off emerged, as well as with the VIB Transformation Facility and the VIB Agro-Incubator.
The company will also work with additional industry partners to support shared scientific strategies and data exchange, an effort intended to accelerate progress across the broader agricultural innovation ecosystem.
Founded in 2025 as a spin-off from the VIB–UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology, Rainbow Crops is led by co-founder and CEO Giacomo Bastianelli. The company develops climate-resilient, high-performing crop varieties by integrating multiplex editing, precision breeding and high-throughput phenotyping.
By focusing on complex traits that matter most under climate stress, Rainbow Crops aims to help reshape the future of sustainable agriculture, ensuring that farmers on the front lines of climate change have crops capable of surviving and thriving.
Engineering complex traits beyond traditional breeding
Rainbow Crops’ Trait Foundry™ platform operates on the principle that traditional breeding often struggles with many vital agronomic traits that are governed not by a single gene but by multiple interacting genes. Drought tolerance, plant vigour, and heat resilience fall squarely into this category.
To tackle these multi-gene networks, the platform combines multiplex genome editing, advanced computation, precision breeding and automated phenotyping. Instead of identifying one promising gene, Trait Foundry™ systematically maps and selects combinations of alleles that work together to improve crop performance.
This approach is designed to deliver the kind of precision and speed that conventional breeding or single-gene modification methods cannot match. By understanding how different alleles interact under real environmental stress, Rainbow Crops aims to develop crop varieties that germinate reliably, establish early and survive the hottest, driest seasons.
Giacomo Bastianelli, Co-founder and CEO of Rainbow Crops, said, “This grant allows us to further strengthen our technology platform and contribute foundational advances that enable more climate-resilient crops, with relevance to regions most vulnerable to environmental change.”
