Building the most important technology for agriculture with Nitroduck (YC F26)
Brno, Czechia
Joined November 2026
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- Following52
- Followers31
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Matúš Grieš retweeted
Today we are launching @BioDelivera a programmable drug delivery platform that delivers therapies only to diseased cells enabling cures for every disease. 🎯🧪
Less than 3% of an injected therapy reaches diseased cells. The rest ends up in healthy organs. At @BioDelivera we want to change that, our mission is to make every therapy accessible to patients.
Happy to build with @ikeda_trashi this exciting technology!
Reach out at [email protected]
Matúš Grieš retweeted
X intro: I'm Matt, a Czech-Slovak guy in red glasses, programming plant DNA to build the first Crop Design Company, to make GMOs sexy again, eventually :)
Funny enough, my family were in Greenpeace, the biggest GMO haters. I wanted to be a conservationist and joined some NGOs, but also crypto-anarchy groups, where I realized the best way to protect nature is to own land privately and leave it be.
Biotech was my closest shot at money, since I won some national biology competitions. So I went into cancer research, where the money is, until I met a girl, a plant scientist. Didn't get the girl, but became the plant guy who led a student team winning iGEM, the Olympics of biotech, together with @matgries and @miro_slau, Nitroduck's co-founders :)
Before Nitroduck took over, I held Slovakia's birding Big Year record, was the country's most productive bike food courier, a landscape photographer, mountaineer, and crypto anarchist :))
Now I'm in the US, forever grateful for @ycombinator , 5050, Tesla FSD, and so much more this country gave me!
Matúš Grieš retweeted
Oh wow so flavormaxxing is happening
Nitroduck designs new colors, flavors, and disease resistance into fruits and veggies. We integrate CRISPR into breeding through pollen, making any crop gene-editable.
Breeding a new specialty crop variety takes 8 - 16 years: breeders hope for random gene combinations and mutations, then spend years picking out the good ones. Meanwhile, consumer tastes, the climate trends, and pathogens change way faster.
Now, accessible genome sequencing and AI can tell breeders what to aim for instead of what to hope for, and CRISPR can turn random mutations into chosen ones. The catch is that CRISPR only works on about 15% of crops. It has to go into a single stem cell that’s then regrown into a whole plant, a process that has to be worked out for each variety, which is cost-prohibitive.
We skip the stem cell and put CRISPR into a pollen grain. The grain pollinates a flower, and out comes an edited seed - seamlessly tapping into how breeders already work.
Matúš, Miro, and I are plant synthetic biologists who made duckweed, the smallest and fastest-growing plant on Earth, genetically engineerable. For doing so we won the Grand Prize at iGEM, the “Olympics of biotech.” During our studies, we engineered 4x more plants than the average plant scientist does in a whole career. Now we’re building Nitroduck, The Crop Design Company, which will make pesticides obsolete by 2042.
Matúš Grieš retweeted
Would love to see more biotech in plants !!! Congrats on the launch @jamexnik_ !
Also hopeful we will see USDA updating regs to make all this move faster. Would be huge benefit to US rural economies if we could get more ag startups like this !!
Nitroduck designs new colors, flavors, and disease resistance into fruits and veggies. We integrate CRISPR into breeding through pollen, making any crop gene-editable.
Breeding a new specialty crop variety takes 8 - 16 years: breeders hope for random gene combinations and mutations, then spend years picking out the good ones. Meanwhile, consumer tastes, the climate trends, and pathogens change way faster.
Now, accessible genome sequencing and AI can tell breeders what to aim for instead of what to hope for, and CRISPR can turn random mutations into chosen ones. The catch is that CRISPR only works on about 15% of crops. It has to go into a single stem cell that’s then regrown into a whole plant, a process that has to be worked out for each variety, which is cost-prohibitive.
We skip the stem cell and put CRISPR into a pollen grain. The grain pollinates a flower, and out comes an edited seed - seamlessly tapping into how breeders already work.
Matúš, Miro, and I are plant synthetic biologists who made duckweed, the smallest and fastest-growing plant on Earth, genetically engineerable. For doing so we won the Grand Prize at iGEM, the “Olympics of biotech.” During our studies, we engineered 4x more plants than the average plant scientist does in a whole career. Now we’re building Nitroduck, The Crop Design Company, which will make pesticides obsolete by 2042.
Matúš Grieš retweeted
Congrats on the launch @jamexnik_! Let's make plant biology controllable.
Nitroduck designs new colors, flavors, and disease resistance into fruits and veggies. We integrate CRISPR into breeding through pollen, making any crop gene-editable.
Breeding a new specialty crop variety takes 8 - 16 years: breeders hope for random gene combinations and mutations, then spend years picking out the good ones. Meanwhile, consumer tastes, the climate trends, and pathogens change way faster.
Now, accessible genome sequencing and AI can tell breeders what to aim for instead of what to hope for, and CRISPR can turn random mutations into chosen ones. The catch is that CRISPR only works on about 15% of crops. It has to go into a single stem cell that’s then regrown into a whole plant, a process that has to be worked out for each variety, which is cost-prohibitive.
We skip the stem cell and put CRISPR into a pollen grain. The grain pollinates a flower, and out comes an edited seed - seamlessly tapping into how breeders already work.
Matúš, Miro, and I are plant synthetic biologists who made duckweed, the smallest and fastest-growing plant on Earth, genetically engineerable. For doing so we won the Grand Prize at iGEM, the “Olympics of biotech.” During our studies, we engineered 4x more plants than the average plant scientist does in a whole career. Now we’re building Nitroduck, The Crop Design Company, which will make pesticides obsolete by 2042.
Matúš Grieš retweeted
BREAKING: A Y Combinator startup emerges from stealth with technology to create fruits and vegetables with new colors and flavors, aiming to make pesticides obsolete by 2042.
Nitroduck is developing a gene-editing platform that delivers CRISPR through pollen grains, allowing breeders to introduce new traits and disease resistance across a wider range of crops. The company aims to cut breeding timelines from 8–16 years to under four, enabling breeders to introduce disease-resistant varieties faster than pathogens can adapt.
The technology could also allow breeders to develop new fruits and vegetables in response to consumer trends, much like the fashion industry.
ALT Source: Nitroduck
Matúš Grieš retweeted
Nitroduck designs new colors, flavors, and disease resistance into fruits and veggies. We integrate CRISPR into breeding through pollen, making any crop gene-editable.
Breeding a new specialty crop variety takes 8 - 16 years: breeders hope for random gene combinations and mutations, then spend years picking out the good ones. Meanwhile, consumer tastes, the climate trends, and pathogens change way faster.
Now, accessible genome sequencing and AI can tell breeders what to aim for instead of what to hope for, and CRISPR can turn random mutations into chosen ones. The catch is that CRISPR only works on about 15% of crops. It has to go into a single stem cell that’s then regrown into a whole plant, a process that has to be worked out for each variety, which is cost-prohibitive.
We skip the stem cell and put CRISPR into a pollen grain. The grain pollinates a flower, and out comes an edited seed - seamlessly tapping into how breeders already work.
Matúš, Miro, and I are plant synthetic biologists who made duckweed, the smallest and fastest-growing plant on Earth, genetically engineerable. For doing so we won the Grand Prize at iGEM, the “Olympics of biotech.” During our studies, we engineered 4x more plants than the average plant scientist does in a whole career. Now we’re building Nitroduck, The Crop Design Company, which will make pesticides obsolete by 2042.