Fieldstone Bio builds microbes that can feel everything from TNT to arsenic

The world is steeped in data, well, the world – thanks Satellite and Environmental sensors. But there is still a lot that we cannot see, and Fieldstone Bio believes that microbes can change it.

“They have evolved to sensitize information and respond to it. It is only trillion of accounts that occur at all times around us,” Brandon Fields, Fieldstone CVThe co -founder and chief science official told Techcrunch. “How do we take this and play this in reality to gain benefits to us?”

Fieldstone has appeared from this question. The startup company was established in 2023 after leaving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Professor Chris Voyage’s laboratory has developed a way to convert microbes into sensors. Scientists programmed microbes to change the color when they faced something important, whether it was nutrients in the soil or landmines hidden in dirt, and then discovered how to discover them.

“How do we really imagine these cells from afar?” Said Fields. “

Fieldstone BIO recently raised $ 5 million of seed financing led by FebiQuity Ventures with the participation of E14 and LDV CAPITAL, the company told Techcrunch exclusively. The startup company tests its technology in the laboratory, and it will allow it to test these microbes in the real world.

Each strain is designed for a specific compound, such as nitrogen in the farm field or TNT residue from a ground player.

“We isolate the microbes from the environments that we want to feel,” said Fields. “We build our DNA sensors, and we just go down in these different things and see which actions are the best, which can last the longest.”

Once the microbes are ready, Fieldstone will broadcast them using drones. After microbes have some time to feel their environment – several hours to days, depending on the target – the company will get other drones in the area.

Pictures are not usual air photography on Google Maps. Instead, they are taken using what is known as the high spectral camera, which divides visible light and infrared into 600 different colors. Since Fieldstone microbes will reflect light on a very specific wavelength, it can train artificial intelligence models to search for these signals amid a flood of data.

“This is the place where the strength of artificial intelligence comes, because we can start using this information to excite these faint signals to produce great thermal maps of the microbe that senses the environment,” said Fields.

In addition to agriculture and national security applications, Patrick Stone, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO, CEO of Patrick Stone, as well as agricultural and national security applications, as well as agricultural and national security applications, Fieldstone is also a microbial programming to discover environmental pollutants such as arsenic.

He said: “Instead of going to basic soil samples over 100 feet-then you have a 100-foot resolution-we can get one inch resolution and really draw to the place they need to clean things.”

The genetic microbial sensors on the farm fields will surely raise the eyebrows between people who oppose genetic modification. Fields said that the company is in contact with the Environmental Protection Agency to ensure that the company follows the regulations.

Fields said that over time, he hopes that the company database will become large enough so that it can train forms to connect other signals in the environment with any data that is returned by microbes. This would allow high -spectrum cameras to detect, for example, arsenic pollution without the need to spread engineering microbes.

“In the end, you don’t need to apply the microbe at all,” said Fields. “You have drones, aircraft and satellites that now collect information about chemical information on a global scale.”