The world is awash in data about, well, the world — thanks to satellites and environmental sensors. But there’s still a lot we can’t see, and Fieldstone Bio thinks microbes can change that.
“They’ve evolved to sense and respond to information. It’s just trillions of calculations going on at all times all around us,” Brandon Fields, Fieldstone Bio’s co-founder and chief science officer, told TechCrunch. “How do we take that and actually manipulate that to gain benefits for us?”
Fieldstone’s technology emerged from that question. The startup was founded in 2023 after spinning out of MIT, where professor Chris Voigt’s lab had developed a way to turn microbes into sensors. The scientists programmed the microbes to change color when they encountered something of interest, whether it be nutrients in soil or landmines hidden in the dirt, and then figured out how to detect them.
“The key technology out of Chris’ lab is this idea of, ‘How do we actually visualize these cells from really far away?’” Fields said.
Fieldstone Bio recently raised $5 million in seed funding led by Ubiquity Ventures with participation from E14 and LDV Capital, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. The startup has been testing its technology in the lab, and the funding will let it test those microbes in the real world.
Each strain is tailored to sense a particular compound, such as nitrogen on a farm field or TNT residue from a landmine.
“We isolate microbes from the environments we want to sense,” Fields said. “We build our sensors the DNA pieces, and we just drop them into these different ones and see which ones behave the best, which ones can last the longest.”
Once the microbes are ready, Fieldstone will broadcast them using drones. After the microbes have some time to sense their environment — several hours to days, depending on the target — the company will have another drone snap photos of the area.
The images aren’t the usual aerial photography seen on Google Maps. Rather, they’re taken using what’s known as a hyperspectral camera, which divide visible and infrared light into as many as 600 different colors. Because Fieldstone’s microbes will reflect light at a very specific wavelength, it can train AI models to look for those signals amid a torrent of data.
“That’s where the power of AI comes in, because we can start using that information to tease out these really faint signals to produce really cool heat maps of the microbe sensing the environment,” Fields said.
In addition to agriculture and national security applications, Fieldstone is also programming microbes to detect environmental contaminants like arsenic, CEO Patrick Stone said.
“Instead of going to do core soil samples over every 100 feet — and then you have 100 foot resolution — we could get a one-inch resolution and really map out exactly where they need to go clean up stuff,” he said.
Gene-edited microbial sensors broadcast over farm fields are sure to raise the eyebrows among people who oppose genetic modification. Fields said that the company has been in contact with the EPA to ensure that the company follows regulations.
Fields said that, over time, he hopes the company’s database will become large enough that it can train models to associate other signals in the environment with whatever data is returned by the microbes. That would allow hyperspectral cameras to detect, say, arsenic contamination without needing to spread the engineered microbes.
“Eventually, you don’t need to apply the microbe at all,” Fields said. “You have drones, planes, and satellites now collecting information about chemical information on a global scale.”
