Lux Foods

YC company profile

Crops engineered for premium fruit, grown without sunlight.

Lux Foods engineers ultra-compact plants that produce mostly fruit, then grows them on sugar with 90% less light. We design the biology and hardware together to make robotic farming easier. Starting with cherry tomatoes, we’re building year-round production of flavorful, nutritious, pesticide-free fruit near the people who eat it. Our tomatoes have been grown on the International Space Station, and now we're taking this technology to Earth.

• YC batch: Fall 2026
• Founded: 2023
• Team size: 4
• Location: San Francisco
• Country: US
• Status: Active
• Industry: Industrials
• Stage: Early
• Tags: Cellular Agriculture, Robotics, Manufacturing, Agriculture, Biotechnology
• YC partner: Charlie Warren

Founders

Andre Yeung — Founder/CEO

CEO & co-founder at Lux Foods. Stanford BioE/Computer Science (AI) B.S./B.S.. First lab student in Dr. Robert Jinkerson's lab at UC Riverside, leading project on endosymbiotic gene transfer in algae. Previously student researcher at Brophy Lab working on synthetic genetic circuits in plants. Founded Fruit for Homeless nonprofit, leading 25 students to rescue and distribute 300,000 pounds of fresh fruit to underserved LA communities. Regeneron STS Semi-finalist, iGEM silver medalist.

LinkedIn · X

Robert Jinkerson — Founder

Co-founder & CSO at Lux Foods. Professor of Chemical Engineering at UC Riverside since 2017, engineering crops for controlled environments and space. Led the UCR team that won NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge and flew cherry tomatoes to the ISS. NSF CAREER Award, FFAR New Innovator Award. Showed plants can grow on acetate without sunlight (Nature Food 2022). Previously postdoc at Stanford; PhD, Colorado School of Mines.

X

Source: Y Combinator · Retrieved 2026-11-02. Company information is self-reported on YC.