Pairwise Named No. 26 on TIME Magazine’s America’s Top GreenTech Companies of 2026

Pairwise today announced it has been named No. 26 on TIME Magazine’s America’s Top GreenTech Companies of 2026. The ranking recognizes the top 250 U.S.-based companies shaping the future of sustainable business and environmental innovation. Statista gathered and scrutinized data from over 3,500 companies, and awarded the top 250 based on three evaluation criteria:

Positive Environmental Impact: To assess a company’s positive environmental impact, Statista partnered with The Upright Project to quantify the holistic impact of a company’s product and service portfolio, including its alignment with the UN Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs).

Financial Strength: For the evaluation of financial strength, Statista analyzed revenue, employee and funding data, obtained from publicly available sources like annual reports, company websites, through media monitoring, and via databases.

Innovation Drive: For the innovation drive, Statista cooperated with LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions to analyze the quantity and impact of a company’s IP (intellectual property) portfolio.

"Being named to TIME's list is a meaningful recognition of what this team has built," said Tom Adams, CEO of Pairwise. "The opportunity in permanent crops is massive, and Pairwise is demonstrating what becomes possible when the best CRISPR tools, AI and machine learning, and decades of breeding knowledge converge at the same moment. We are driving a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a healthier world by making plants easier to grow and eat, and the moment to do that is now."

To read the full list, visit: https://time.com/7344228/americas-top-greentech-companies-of-2025/

Pairwise is one of a select group of companies recognized this year for using biotechnology to address the challenges of a warming world. The feature highlights our pipeline of gene-edited crops, including short-stature corn and blackberries, designed to thrive under increasingly harsh conditions, and our partnerships with Bayer and Corteva to scale climate-resilient traits across agriculture.

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“You don't notice the seeds in a blackberry until you’ve tried a seedless one,” says Tom Adams, the boss of Pairwise, a biotech company in North Carolina that is working on the first iteration of such a fruit. Gene-edited blackberries are not technically without seeds. Rather, as with seedless grapes, those seeds are so small and soft as to be unnoticeable. Late last year Pairwise announced a joint venture with a fruit-breeding company to develop stoneless cherries, following the success of conventionally bred seedless grapes, watermelons and easy-peel mandarins. It is only a matter of time until more challenging fruits are similarly eviscerated.

Over thousands of years of domestication, humans have moulded fruit to their liking. Today’s peaches are 16 times the size of their ancient ancestors. The 1,200 varieties of watermelon bear little resemblance to the pale and pip-filled gourd that preceded them. Cultivated fruits also tend to be sweeter. (So much so that some zoos have stopped feeding them to animals.) Some modern fruits, however, achieve their sweetness by lowering acidity and bitterness rather than piling in extra sugar.

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