Ohalo Genetics Has a Plan to Boost Crop Yields by 100%

The agriculture industry has a word for what Ohalo Genetics is promising: impossible. The California startup has raised $205 million to prove otherwise.

Ohalo says its platform has produced yield gains of 50% to more than 100% in trials across potatoes, strawberries, and other staple crops. To understand how audacious that is, consider the baseline: genetic progress in agriculture typically compounds at around 1% a year, a pace roughly unchanged since the Green Revolution of the 1960s, when the introduction of high-yield varieties lifted hundreds of millions out of famine and was still considered one of the great scientific achievements of the 20th century. What Ohalo is claiming, if it holds at commercial scale, would be larger.

The technology, which the company calls Boosted Breeding, works by interfering with the mechanism that splits a plant’s genome during reproduction. In conventional breeding, offspring inherit a random half of each parent’s DNA; breeders then spend years, sometimes decades, selecting and recrossing plants to concentrate desirable traits. Ohalo uses gene editing and proprietary proteins to force offspring to inherit complete genomes from both parents, producing polyploid plants that carry every beneficial trait from each side. No foreign DNA is introduced, the company says; it is rearranging what already exists in the plant.

David Friedberg, Ohalo’s chief executive, built The Climate Corporation, a crop insurance and weather analytics platform that Monsanto acquired for $1.1 billion in 2013 (the first unicorn exit in agtech). He co-founded Ohalo in 2019 with Judson Ward, a molecular biologist specializing in crop genetics, and ran the company in stealth mode for five years before disclosing the technology publicly in 2024. PitchBook puts total funding at roughly $205 million, from backers including Craft Ventures, Hedosophia, S32, and Valor Capital Group.

Potatoes are the company’s most advanced program and its clearest argument for why the problem is worth solving. The crop trails only wheat and rice in global consumption, yet most of it is still grown from cut pieces of other potatoes, a system that is expensive, disease-prone, and consumes more than 20% of industry revenue in annual replanting costs. Ohalo produces genetically uniform true potato seed that ships in a lightweight packet and can be sown directly, replacing refrigerated trucks and cut tubers. Friedberg has pointed to India and Sub-Saharan Africa as priority markets, places where potatoes are a dietary staple and the supply chain for conventional planting material is weakest. The USDA cleared a separate Ohalo-modified potato for commercial cultivation in September 2023, though that review covered a sugar-profile modification rather than the boosted breeding technology itself.

Ohalo launched FruitionOne in October 2024, which it describes as the world’s first self-fertile Nonpareil variety. Nonpareil almonds command a premium in California’s almond industry but have always required a second pollinator variety planted alongside them, creating dependence on commercial beehives at a time when pollinator populations are under pressure. Ohalo says FruitionOne eliminates that requirement, cutting pollination costs by more than half and harvest expenses by roughly 30%. Early orders open in late 2026, with first commercial deliveries in 2027.

Strawberries presented a harder challenge than almonds. Last December, Ohalo signed an agreement with the University of Florida and the Florida Strawberry Growers Association to breed resistance to neopestalotiopsis, a fungal disease that has been devastating Florida fields since 2017 and for which no commercially available resistant variety exists; experimental trials began earlier this year. In March 2025 it went further, launching the Ohalo Strawberry Consortium with California Giant Berry Farms, Naturipe, Wish Farms, and others, led by Dr. Phil Stewart, who spent 17 years running global strawberry breeding at Driscoll’s. That program is developing more flavorful varieties distributed as true seed, cutting out the expensive nursery propagation system the industry still depends on. Field trials are underway.

The business model across all of these is licensing. Ohalo does not plan to own farms or run its own distribution. It sells seed and licenses its technology to grower associations, university programs, and regional seed companies that carry it into markets where they have existing scale and relationships. Friedberg says the company is already generating revenue.

The risks are real and the company has not confronted all of them. Polyploidy, in which a plant carries multiple sets of chromosomes, occurs naturally in many species, but engineering it deliberately across a range of crops at commercial scale is largely uncharted. Friedberg has acknowledged that beyond a species-specific threshold, yield gains can reverse into declines, and that established breeders have pushed back on his data. Mapping those limits will require years of field results across varied soils and climates that Ohalo does not yet have. Agtech has a long record of yield claims that looked compelling in controlled trials and collapsed in open fields. The EU compounds the uncertainty further, still regulating gene-edited crops as genetically modified organisms and effectively closing off a major market with no clear timeline for change.

Friedberg is not the only person who has tried to accelerate plant breeding. A generation of agtech companies made similar promises in the 2010s, raised large sums, and delivered incremental results at best. Several collapsed entirely. What is different this time, Ohalo’s backers argue, is that the underlying genomic tools, gene editing, quantitative genetics, high-throughput screening, have matured to the point where the biology is genuinely tractable in ways it was not a decade ago. Whether that argument is right is something only time in the field will resolve.

What Ohalo has, for now, is regulatory clearance in the US, paying customers, and active programs across multiple crops. What it does not have is the one thing that would settle the argument: large-scale, multi-season yield data from commercial farms. The FAO estimates global food production will need to grow at least 50% by 2050. At 1% a year, conventional breeding does not get there. The fields will have the final say.