Flagship Pioneering Names Ponsi Trivisvavet 2024 Pioneering Leader of the Year

Annual Entrepreneurial Leadership Award Recognizes Innovations in Sustainability at Flagship-founded Inari

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., November 21, 2024 – Flagship Pioneering, the bioplatform innovation company, today announced the recipient of its annual Pioneering Leader Award: Ponsi Trivisvavet, CEO and Director of Inari. It was awarded to Trivisvavet at Flagship Pioneering's 2024 Annual Meeting, held today in Boston, Massachusetts.

Trivisvavet was honored for her visionary leadership and transformative work at Inari, a Flagship-founded company that is revolutionizing agriculture through sustainable innovations in seed design. Under Trivisvavet’s guidance since 2018, Inari has developed cutting-edge solutions to enhance plant breeding, emphasizing food system sustainability.

“Ponsi’s dedication to advancing sustainable agriculture and her leadership at Inari exemplify the innovative spirit that defines Flagship,” said Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering. “Her pioneering efforts are transforming agtech innovation and accelerating a shift towards more sustainable farming and more sustainable food supplies. Flagship is pleased to recognize Ponsi with our annual Pioneering Leader Award, our highest entrepreneurial honor.”

“Flagship hired Ponsi in 2018 to be the CEO of Inari, a company with an audacious and against-the-odds mission: adapt the tools of human gene editing to the agricultural market to design a new class of seeds that show a radical improvement in yield and with much lower resource usage,” said Stephen Berenson, Flagship Managing Partner and Inari Director. “We can now declare the mission a success. By combining AI-powered predictive seed design with its gene editing platform, Inari has generated seeds with exceptional performance. I congratulate Ponsi for her tremendous leadership of Inari and for her leadership making its audacious mission a reality.”

Founded in 2016 by Flagship Pioneering, Inari is a seed technology company revolutionizing agriculture to enhance its societal and environmental impact. Utilizing its unique SEEDesign™ platform, Inari combines biological and data sciences to optimize plant performance and reduce environmental impacts to create a more resilient agricultural future. By integrating AI-powered predictive design and a cutting-edge multiplex gene editing toolbox, Inari develops enhanced seeds that dramatically increase yields without the need for more land, water, or input requirements. The company is pushing the boundaries of possibility to deliver transformative soybean, corn, and wheat products for a more sustainable, nature-positive food system.

Inari was featured along with other Flagship-founded agriculture companies Indigo, Invaio and CIBO in “Pioneering a Sustainable Future for Food,” a short film that captures Flagship’s vision for a sustainable future in agriculture and the people and technologies that are making that vision a reality today.

Previous recipients of Flagship's annual entrepreneurial leadership award include Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, Ryan Watts, CEO of Denali Therapeutics, and Nancy Simonian, M.D., CEO of Syros Pharmaceuticals.

About Flagship Pioneering

Flagship Pioneering invents and builds bioplatform companies, each with the potential for multiple products that transform human health or sustainability. Since its launch in 2000, Flagship has originated and fostered more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in more than $60 billion in aggregate value. Flagship is operating with $14 billion of assets under management as of its latest capital raise, announced in July 2024. The current Flagship ecosystem comprises over 40 companies, including Foghorn Therapeutics (NASDAQ: FHTX), Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA), Omega Therapeutics (NASDAQ: OMGA), Sana Biotechnology (NASDAQ: SANA), Generate Biomedicines, Inari, Indigo Agriculture, and Tessera Therapeutics.