The collaboration aims to advance agricultural resilience and crop-based carbon removal using AI technologies.

Oxford spin-out Wild Bioscience (Wild Bio) and technology company Oracle have announced a collaboration that will see both groups advance agricultural resilience and crop-based carbon removal using AI. As part of the partnership, Wild Bio intends to utilise Oracle cloud and IoT tech in support of its field research. 

Established in 2021 by Irish business partners Dr Ross Hendron and Prof Steve Kelly, Wild Bio specialises in crop genetics by researching genetic solutions that developed through evolution to improve crops in the past, and then using these discoveries to design simple fixes for modern crops.

The start-up uses AI to tackle two major challenges in agriculture: maintaining crop productivity as environmental stress increases and developing crop varieties that can remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

Wild Bio will use Oracle’s technology to capture field data, bring it together in an integrated cloud environment and use AI to analyse the resulting datasets and inform future research.

Oracle’s technology will be used to analyse real-time data from field trials by studying soil moisture, plant performance and environmental conditions, building an auditable, field-level measurement system for how much carbon the studied crops are actually taking in. This will then inform and power Wild Bio’s own research.

The organisations are of the opinion that AI has the ability to learn from millions of years of plant evolution and identify traits that can improve how crops perform.

Commenting on the partnership, Clay Magouyrk, the CEO of Oracle said: “AI is creating new opportunities to solve problems that once seemed out of reach. Wild Bio is a powerful example of how combining AI with deep scientific expertise can turn new ideas into practical solutions with the potential to improve lives around the world.”

“The world cannot solve climate change and food security as separate problems,” said Kelly, the chief scientific officer for Wild Bio. 

Kelly added: “We need crops that can perform better under increasing pressure while also helping address atmospheric CO2. This collaboration enables us to build the capabilities we need to measure how our crops perform in the field.”

The collaboration will also support Oracle’s broader sustainability strategy, including its commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, according to the tech giant.

In late July, Wild Bioscience acquired wheat breeding business F1 Seed for an undisclosed amount. In acquiring the organisation, Wild Bio said it was aiming to become a fully integrated, end-to-end UK seed company, forming a single business capable of designing, breeding and delivering new wheat varieties for growers.

Last year, the company raised $60m in a Series A funding round led by the Ellison Institute of Technology, a research institute founded by Larry Ellison – better known to most as the co-founder and chair of Oracle.

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