Ohalo

Building Ohalo’s infrastructure to power crop improvements and plant breeding technology

Biotech

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Our Impact

We helped Ohalo build their cloud infrastructure layer and data pipelines on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), supporting their research to make agriculture more efficient and sustainable.

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Established GCP infrastructure to work with their on-premises hardware, including robotic and server systems
Set up Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) on top of a service mesh for horizontal scaling and future growth
Built an API for large-scale image ingestion and data management

Ohalo™ is a pioneering biotechnology company that accelerates evolution to unlock nature's potential.

Using cutting-edge biotechnology, they are transforming agriculture by developing highly efficient breeding systems, such as their Boosted Breeding™ technology. These innovations provide farmers with new plant varieties that offer unparalleled yield, efficiency, and profitability, while simultaneously reducing the land, water, and energy footprint of crops.

Ohalo's mission is to revolutionize global agriculture, ensuring better crop yield and resiliency for a sustainable future.

THE VISION
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Ohalo operates a sophisticated biotechnology platform that integrates robotics, on-premises servers, and cloud infrastructure. Their vision is to develop a scalable data platform that enables comprehensive management of the entire plant material lifecycle. To achieve this, Ohalo aimed to leverage Kubernetes for their compute workloads, preparing for high scalability and efficient data processing.

The platform's goal is to integrate streamlined inventory management, phenotypic data acquisition, and data-informed decision support. By utilizing Kubernetes, Ohalo can enhance the precision and efficiency of their plant breeding and production processes, allowing for seamless scaling of computational resources as their data processing needs grow.

WHY LAZER?
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On top of our engineering expertise and efficiency, we were able to provide deep infrastructure experience to Ohalo, specifically in the GCP ecosystem and Kubernetes. We also offered to help upskill their team on infrastructure as code (IaC).

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platform

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Expertise

Backend Development
Infrastructure Development
Integrations

Stage

Series A

Approach

Building GCP and GKE infrastructure

We set up Ohalo’s GCP infrastructure to enable continuous delivery on GKE.

This would be the backbone for all of their workloads and needed to communicate to both their on-premises services and cloud services like Firestore, BigQuery, PubSub, and CloudRun.

We used Istio Ingress Gateway and Anthos Service Mesh to secure mutual TLS (mTLS) between workloads inside the Kubernetes cluster, as well as to make it more performant while using less load balancers.

Approach

Autopilot mode in GKE to reduce costs

We used Autopilot mode with GKE to decrease maintenance and development costs, and to ease provisioning of GPU and TPU hardware for machine learning and AI workloads.

Approach

Data pipelines between hardware and AI

We built an API for Ohalo to ingest lab images of plants and seeds from their on-the-ground hardware and move the data to their Google Cloud storage.

It needed to be highly performant to support processing new image batches every few seconds.

The image data collection will be analyzed by their AI engine to determine if the samples have the desired attributes, which will be fed back into their robotic system for high-throughput screening applications.

Approach

Introducing Ohalo's team to IaC

We ran workshops to help level their team up in IaC using Pulumi. We also provided workshops and step-by-step documentation for knowledge transfer and to set their developers up for future success.

We’re really excited about the revolutionary effects that Ohalo is going to have on agriculture. They’ve already applied Boosted Breeding™ to potatoes and other crops, bringing hybrid breeding and seeds to every step of the value chain, from farmers all the way to consumers.