Agricultural biotechnology · Plant genomics
Rev Genomics
An Oakland company that breeds cannabis cultivars with genomic selection and tissue culture, then licenses them to growers. Its California nursery license runs to June 2027. Its only securities filing is from 2019.
A request nobody was obliged to answer
In May 2019 the board of the Open Cannabis Project voted to shut the nonprofit down. It had spent years collecting samples from breeders so their plants could be sequenced into a public record, and it closed in the fallout from a fight over what a sequencing company meant to do with the data. In June its former director, Beth Schechter, listed what she still hoped someone would do, including a public marker analysis of the data the project had gathered.
Two Oakland plant scientists read it. Neither had any part in the dispute and, as Future Cannabis Project reported that September, neither was known to anyone at the project. Three months later Bertrand Vick and Cody Markelz published a marker map built from the public sequence data and gave it away under a Creative Commons license.
The read me file was plain about the scale: “We provide these 23500+ SNP and 2200+ InDel molecular markers from 1358 cultivars to the cannabis community to facilitate innovation in breeding efforts and the creation of new cultivars in this amazing plant.”
“This is not about us getting customers, but doing something good for the community,” Vick said.
Breeding a crop with no pedigree records
Cannabis was bred illegally for decades, so it reached the legal market with famous names and almost no paperwork. Wired reported in 2019 that DNA testing lets growers check whether they are mislabeling their own cultivars, which happens with some regularity. The first utility patents on cannabis were granted in 2015, and the race to lock down plant intellectual property is what made breeders wary of anyone collecting their DNA.
The conventional way to find a good plant is a pheno hunt: grow hundreds of seedlings, wait for them to flower, keep the one worth keeping. That takes seasons. Rev sells the shortcut. Its site says the company cuts “traditional pheno-hunting timelines down to weeks” with whole genome selection, in house metabolite analytics and tissue culture, and it is blunt about the pitch to breeders, cultivators and seed banks: to “bestow un-fair market advantage.”
At Y Combinator demo day in August 2017, TechCrunch wrote up the plan. Rev thought it could make the “best cannabis in the world,” was going after Botrytis, the gray mold that can take out a crop, and would get there by “quantifying the gene expression levels of all 30,000 genes in the cannabis genome.”
An algae scientist and a plant statistician
Vick did a PhD in molecular and cell biology at Berkeley and took classes at the Haas School of Business, where he met an MBA student named Matt Caspari. With Guido Radaelli they won the Berkeley Business Plan Competition and its $25,000 prize with a plan to turn algae into biodiesel, and built the company that became Aurora Algae, where Vick served as chief scientific officer.
“In a place like Berkeley you are surrounded by pretty amazing people and resources,” he told the university’s graduate division in 2010.
Markelz came from the academic side: a PhD in plant biology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, four and a half years of postdoctoral work at UC Davis, a dozen papers in PubMed under university addresses. He was co-founder and VP of genomics from 2015 to 2020. A 2019 version of the site listed Erik Elder as VP of sales.
Demo day, then a license, then quiet
The milestones page, archived in October 2018, dates the start to October 2015, has the company incorporated in California in October 2016, says it filed its first patent that month, and records trial product delivered to key partners in March 2018.
The public record picks up in 2019 and moves fast. First sale of a Regulation D offering on April 24. Form D filed May 3, reporting $1,495,360 sold of a $2,000,000 raise across 36 investors. Nursery license CCL18-0002678 issued June 7. The marker map in September. The provisional license number converted to the annual one in October.
Then it goes quiet. No second Form D, no federal grant, no paper, no press coverage after 2019 in any search run for this profile. Markelz dates his own departure to 2020. What is still live is the boring part, and it is not nothing: the state lists the license as active, annual and adult use, expiring June 1, 2027, on a record refreshed September 22, 2026. Y Combinator lists the company as active with eight people and one open science role in Oakland. The website is up.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| State license | CCL18-0002678, cultivation nursery, annual, adult use, status Active. Issued Jun 7, 2019, expires Jun 1, 2027, Alameda County, City of Oakland. Owners listed: Bertrand Vick, Robert Fraley, Robert John Cody Markelz, Wilder Ramsey. Record refreshed Sep 22, 2026. | Public record |
| License history | State conversion list effective Oct 24, 2019 maps provisional number PAL18-0002678 to CCL18-0002678 for Rev Genomics, Inc. | Public record |
| Securities filing | Form D filed May 3, 2019, CIK 0001771749. First sale Apr 24, 2019. $2,000,000 offered, $1,495,360 sold, $504,640 remaining, 36 investors, $5,000 minimum, Rule 506(c). Incorporated in California in 2016. | Public record |
| Reported funding | Nanalyze put the company at “$120k in funding” in March 2019 and a startup database still reported $120,000 as of March 2020. The Form D filed two months later reports $1,495,360 sold. | Differs from filing |
| Patents | The archived milestones page says a first patent was filed in October 2016. A September 2026 search of USPTO data through Justia returns nothing assigned to Rev Genomics; the 20 inventions listed for inventor Bertrand Vick are assigned to Aurora Algae, Inc. No plant variety certificate naming the company was found. | Not found |
| Peer reviewed work | No PubMed indexed paper carries a Rev Genomics affiliation as of Sep 22, 2026. | Not found |
| Federal support | No NIH or NSF award to Rev Genomics in the federal award pull for this profile. | Not found |
| USDA biotechnology status | No APHIS status review or biotechnology record naming the company was found. APHIS did issue status review responses in February 2026 for two gene edited hemp varieties from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. | Not found |
| Open dataset | Marker map released September 2019 from public Open Cannabis Project sequence data, mapped to the Purple Kush reference genome, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. | Independent report |
| Commercial cultivars | The site says cultivars are “now being commercialized in California.” The co-founder claims 15 or more commercial strains. No customer is named in any source found. | Company-stated |
| Current operations | Y Combinator directory: status active, eight people, one open science role in Oakland, retrieved Sep 22, 2026. | Company-stated |
Read plainly: the license and the filing are real and dated, the science claims sit outside any independent test, and the gap between them is seven years wide. A company that says it filed a patent in 2016 has no patent on file under its name. A company built on genomic prediction has published one dataset and no papers. What it holds is a nursery license in good standing in a market shrinking around it, with California’s regulator reporting in April 2026 that nearly 8,000 annual licenses remain active statewide.
What to watch
- The license renewal before June 1, 2027. It is the cheapest public signal that the business is still trading.
- A second Form D. The 2019 round left $504,640 of the offering unsold and nothing has been filed since.
- Any patent or plant variety certificate issued to the company, which would test the 2016 filing claim.
- A named customer or a named cultivar. Licensing revenue stays invisible until someone says so.
In their words
“We essentially license strains to cultivators.”
Bertrand Vick, co-founder and CEO, Future Cannabis Project, 2019 · Independent
“To do marker-assisted breeding, you need a lot of data.”
Bertrand Vick, Future Cannabis Project, 2019 · Independent
“The main thing is that aggregated data is really powerful.”
Cody Markelz, co-founder and VP of genomics, Future Cannabis Project, 2019 · Independent
“It’s always a double-edged sword with this sort of stuff, because companies can still use it, but so can everyone else.”
Cody Markelz on releasing the marker map, Future Cannabis Project, 2019 · Independent
“In a place like Berkeley you are surrounded by pretty amazing people and resources.”
Bertrand Vick on founding Aurora Biofuels, Berkeley Graduate Division, 2010 · Independent
“Under my leadership my team built a data driven Cannabis breeding pipeline using genomic prediction leading to 15+ commercial strains being developed for the legal California market.”
Cody Markelz, personal site, accessed 2026 · Founder-stated
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordCannabis Unified License Search, license CCL18-0002678
- Public recordCalCannabis cultivation license number conversion list
- Public recordForm D, Rev Genomics, Inc., CIK 0001771749
- Public recordPatent searches by inventor and assignee
- Public recordPubMed affiliation and author searches
- IndependentRev Genomics releases SNP map, analysis based on Open Cannabis Project data
- IndependentHigh drama: a cannabis biotech company roils small growers
- IndependentY Combinator Summer 2017 demo day, day 2
- Independent6 cannabis biotech companies for growing the best weed
- IndependentBerkeley trio turns algae into fuel and money
- IndependentUSDA APHIS grants non-regulated status to two gene edited hemp varieties
- IndependentCalifornia declares the cannabis market mature
- CompanyRev Genomics website and archived news and team pages
- CompanyRev Genomics company record
- FounderRev Genomics project page
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
