The mission

Pioneering a healthier path forward

There’s a world of plant knowledge unknown to the scientific community. Brightseed is an AI-driven data company on a mission to illuminate the biological connections between people and plants at the deepest level. Through a lens of nutrition and wellbeing, our goal is to identify the plant bioactives that advance human health.

About us

Champions of nature

Plants create small molecular compounds to communicate with their environment. Bioactives are a special type of plant compound that science knows are paramount in human health. Bioactives show up as antioxidants in blueberries, caffeine in tea, the active ingredient in aspirin, and even in some cancer drugs. However, there was no systematic, scalable way to uncover them — until now.

Brightseed was founded to address the world’s most pressing health challenges. We built Forager to understand nature more deeply than ever before. Our founders share the conviction that the answers for health lie in the natural world — we just needed to know how to look.

We are committed to advancing health by building an ecosystem that delivers bioactives — from agricultural crops to specialized ingredients to pharmaceuticals — to consumers. With every discovery we are growing Forager, the largest knowledge base of the connections between plant bioactives and human biology, and pioneering the next era of health.

Our team of pioneers

We are a diverse group of professionals that include scientists, technologists, metabolomics experts, biologisists, natural product chemists, doctors, process engineers, supply chain builders, and business leaders. We are also musicians, athletes, mothers, fathers, artists, writers, and plant fanatics.

Join the team

Management

Jim Flatt, PhD Co-Founder and CEO
Sofia Elizondo Co-Founder and COO
Lee Chae, PhD Co-Founder and CTO
Stephanie Wright Chief People Officer
George Stagnitti SVP Product

Board

Elaine Leavenworth Former CMO, Abbott Nutrition
Becky O’Grady Former President of Yoplait and Häagen-Dazs, General Mills
Larry Page Investor, Lewis & Clark
Bart Swanson Investor, Horizons Ventures
Chuck Templeton Former Founder and CEO, OpenTable Former Chairman, GrubHub Investor, S2G

Advisors

Jed Fahey, ScD Director, Johns Hopkins Medical School
Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, DrPH Cardiologist & Dean of the School of Nutrition, Tufts University
Indra Nooyi Former Chairman & CEO, PepsiCo
Trent Northern Principal Investigator, Exometabolomics Lab, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Walter Robb Former co-CEO, Whole Foods
Bernhard van Lengerich, PhD Former CSO, General Mills