Kyomei
Grow
Kyomei was founded at the University of Oxford by Meir Wachs and Dr. Kyoko Morimoto, combining world-class expertise in entrepreneurship and plant science. Meir, a serial entrepreneur who had previously scaled a company to $82M in revenue within three years, returned to Oxford’s Saïd Business School to build a venture with deep environmental impact. There he met Kyoko, a leading plant biologist with 15+ years of R&D experience at Syngenta and Oxford, whose research focused on harnessing plants’ natural potential for biotechnology applications.
Together, they saw an opportunity to reimagine agriculture as a production platform for sustainable, high-value proteins, ingredients that are currently expensive, unsustainable, or limited by supply. By applying molecular farming, Kyomei programs plants to express valuable proteins in their leaves, unlocking multiple revenue streams from a single crop. Their upstream innovation produces functional recombinant proteins such as sweet proteins that can replace sugar at scale, while their downstream extraction process captures Rubisco and other compounds as additional food-grade ingredients.
Kyomei’s model turns agricultural waste into profit, enabling farmers to monetise crop residues and reduce pressure on land use, while providing food and beverage companies with sustainable, high-performance ingredients.
The company’s mission is to revolutionise agriculture by transforming plants into sustainable biofactories, driving both environmental and economic gains. Its vision is a multi-product agricultural system that replaces extractive, single-yield farming with one where every part of the crop generates value, delivering a smarter, cleaner, and more resilient food system for the future.