About Eden Holdings
A holding company purpose built for the long term stewardship of proprietary plant genetics.
Meet Addison King
Addison King came to the plant genetics business through family and spent the last decade immersed in it. As CFO of Sod Solutions, one of the world's leading plant variety licensing companies, he managed a global portfolio of proprietary cultivars, built and administered royalty programs across dozens of markets, led IP enforcement efforts spanning multiple countries and legal frameworks, and worked directly with breeders, growers, and licensees at every stage of the commercialization process.
That experience gave him a clear view of what this industry looks like from the inside. The patience required to develop a great variety. The complexity of protecting it globally. The challenge of building a genetics business that can outlast its founder. And the gap between the extraordinary value these programs create and the resources most of them have access to.
He founded Eden to close that gap. Not as an outside investor looking in, but as someone who has spent his career doing this work.
Addison holds a B.S. in Financial Management from Clemson University and an MBA from Columbia Business School. He lives in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina with his wife Rebecca and their four children, Jak, Jennie Lee, George, and Libby.
Meet Henry Atkeson
Henry Atkeson came to Eden from Sun World International, a global fruit genetics and licensing business built on proprietary table grape and stone fruit varieties. Working with the Senior VP of Strategy, he covered R&D, licensing, operations, and M&A, helping extend the company's portfolio into citrus, mango, and avocado.
Specialty crop genetics is an unusual business. A variety can take a decade or more to develop and then earn royalties for the next thirty years, yet many of the programs producing that value are small, family owned, and running lean. At the same time the demands keep rising. Retailers want branded varieties they can build a program around, growers want fruit that performs in tougher conditions, and protecting a variety in every market where it ends up planted costs more every year. The largest platforms can carry that weight, but most independent programs were never built to.
That is the gap Henry and Addison started Eden to fill, and it is why Eden buys to hold rather than to sell. Breeders keep breeding, and Eden supplies the capital, legal muscle, and market access behind it. Before Sun World, Henry spent three years at EY-Parthenon, where he ran commercial diligence on more than twenty transactions across food, industrials, and consumer products.
Henry holds a B.A. in History from Amherst College and is completing his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He lives in San Francisco, CA with his fiancée Scottie.
Long term owners. Not flippers.
Eden is a permanent holding company. We don't buy businesses to cut them apart and sell them in three years. We acquire breeding programs and licensing operations with the intent to own them forever.
When we partner with a breeder or acquire a nursery's genetics program, we're making a commitment. The breeders stay. The programs continue. The varieties keep improving. We simply add the resources that allow those programs to reach their full potential. Capital for R&D. Global legal enforcement. Access to new markets. A professional commercialization engine.
What We Look For
The types of businesses we partner with.
Independent breeding companies.
Pure play breeders and variety development firms with proprietary genetics, established royalty streams, and global or regional licensing reach.
Master licensees and variety management firms.
Companies that manage the commercialization and licensing of university or private breeding programs. These asset-light, high-margin businesses are a natural fit for our platform.
Family-owned nurseries with internal breeding programs.
Multi-generational nursery operations that have developed their own varieties over decades. We understand the complexity of succession planning and the desire to see your life's work continue.
Grower shippers with embedded R&D.
Large integrated producers who have built internal breeding programs that could be more fully commercialized if separated from the farming operation.
Our Values
Respect the breeder.
The people who spend decades cross-pollinating, selecting, and trialing new varieties are the backbone of this industry. We honor that work.
Protect the IP.
A plant patent is only as valuable as your willingness to enforce it. We invest heavily in global legal infrastructure to protect the genetics we steward.
Think in decades.
Breeding is a generational endeavor. So is our approach to building Eden.