UrbanKisaan (YC Winter 2020)

UrbanKisaan is an AI-for-plant-biology company. We build foundation models and the physical infrastructure that trains them. Shipping a single new seed variety takes about ten+ years. Two on germplasm, three on crosses and selection, three or four on field trials, one on regulatory. Inside that decade, prediction and experiment never properly meet. DNA is abundant, phenotype data is scarce and unpaired, and the cycle never trains itself. We closed that loop. Three foundation models cover the upstream science. Aadi is a 48-layer transformer trained from scratch on the public and proprietary corpus of plant genomes; it reads plant DNA and ranks variants before any wet-lab spend. Jeeva is the genotype-to-phenotype model that turns a seed and a target environment into yield, flowering, maturi…