hydroponics
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Rise Gardens grows with $9M Series A to help anyone be an indoor farmer
As more consumers embrace plant-based diets and sustainable food practices, Rise Gardens is giving anyone the ability to have a green thumb from the comfort of their own home.
The Chicago-based indoor, smart hydroponic company raised $9 million in an oversubscribed Series A round, led by TELUS Ventures, with existing investors True Ventures and Amazon Alexa Fund and new investor Listen Ventures joining in. The company has a total of $13 million in venture-backed investments since Rise was founded in 2017, founder and CEO Hank Adams told TechCrunch.
Though he began in 2017, Adams, who has a background in sports technology, said he spent a few years working on prototypes before launching the first products in 2019. Rise’s IoT-connected systems are designed to grow vegetables, herbs and microgreens year-round.
Customers can choose between three system levels and get started with their first garden for about $300.
There is a “kind of joyousness” in being able to grow something, but people are looking for assistance because they don’t want to get into a hobby that will become demanding or stressful, Adams said. As a result, Rise’s accompanying mobile app monitors water levels and plant progress, then alert users when it’s time to water, fertilize or care for their plants.
“People are paying attention to food, and they care about what they eat,” he added. “Then the global pandemic played a part in this, with people leaning into growing their own food.”
In fact, customers leaned into growing food so much that Rise Gardens saw its sales eclipse seven figures in 2020, and gardens sold out three times during the year. Customers purchased close to 100,000 plants and have harvested 50,000.
The company estimates it helped keep more than 2,000 pounds of food from being wasted and saved 250,000 gallons of water since launching in 2019.
The concept of an indoor farm is not new. Incumbents include AeroGarden, AeroGrow, which was acquired by Scotts-Miracle Gro last November, and Click & Grow. Rise is among a new crop of startups that have raised funds that include Gardyn.
However, Rise Gardens is differentiating itself from those competitors by making its gardens from powder-coated metals and glass and are designed to be a focal point in the room. It is also offering ways for people to experiment with their gardens.
“We wanted something that would be flexible because once you have mastered a hobby, you will get bored,” he added. “You can start at one level and they swap out tray lids to grow more densely. We have a microgreens kit you can add, or add plant supports for tomatoes and peppers. You can also build a trellis to vine snap peas.”
Adams will focus the Series A dollars into product development, inventory, manufacturing, expansion into new markets and building up the team, especially in the areas of customer service and marketing. Rise has about 25 employees and plans to bring on another eight this year.
In addition, Rise Gardens’ products will soon be available on Amazon — its first channel outside of its website. The company is also expanding into schools in what Adams calls “version 2.0” of the school garden.
When Rich Osborn, president and managing partner of TELUS Ventures, evaluated the indoor garden space, he told TechCrunch that Adams and his team rose to the top of the list because of their background, data experience and syndication with Amazon.
Not only was consumer demand there for these kinds of products, but the sustainability and social impact created from these kinds of investments couldn’t be overemphasized, he said.
Nishan Majarian, co-founder and CEO of TELUS Agriculture, said he sees a future where there is a spectrum of food growth, and crop management will be at the plant level.
“Ever since Climate Corp. was acquired by Monsanto, there has been a massive influx into agriculture to get to the next billion-dollar exit,” Majarian added. “Agrifood is the last segmented supply chain. Every crop is different, every market is different. That makes it local, complex and fertile soil — pun intended — for startups who get capital to solve those issues and scale.”
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New York-based indoor ag company Gotham Greens raises $87 million
Lettuce celebrate the rise of indoor agriculture.
In the past few months, AppHarvest, a developer of greenhouse tomato farms, went public through a special purpose acquisition vehicle, vertical farming giant Plenty raised $140 million, and now Gotham Greens, which is developing its own network of greenhouses, is announcing the close of $87 million in new funding.
These new agriculture companies certainly have a green thumb when it comes to raising a cornucopia of capital.
Gotham Greens’ latest round takes the company to a whopping total of $130 million in funding since its launch. Investors in the round included Manna Tree and The Silverman Group.
While AppHarvest has taken to tomatoes in its attempt to ketchup with the leading agricultural companies, Gotham Greens has decided to let its hydroponically grown leafy greens lead the way to riches.
The company said it would use the latest funding to continue developing more greenhouses across the U.S. and bring new vegetables to market.
“Given increasing challenges facing centralized food supply chains, combined with rapidly shifting consumer preferences, Gotham Greens is focused on expanding its regional growing operations and distribution capabilities at one of the most critical periods for America,” said Viraj Puri, the co-founder and chief executive of Gotham Greens, in a statement.
The company already sells its greens in more than 40 states and operates greenhouses in Chicago, Providence, Rhode Island, Baltimore and Denver. From those greenhouses the company distributes to 2,000 retail locations, including Whole Foods Markets, Albertsons stores, Meijer, Target, King Soopers, Harris Teeter, ShopRite and Sprouts.
And Gotham Greens has already begun to expand its product portfolio. The company now sells packaged salads, cooking sauces and salad bowls in addition to its greens.
Assorted packages of Gotham Greens lettuces on a white field. Image Credit: Gotham Greens
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MIT’s ‘cyber-agriculture’ optimizes basil flavors
The days when you could simply grow a basil plant from a seed by placing it on your windowsill and watering it regularly are gone — there’s no point now that machine learning-optimized hydroponic “cyber-agriculture” has produced a superior plant with more robust flavors. The future of pesto is here.
This research didn’t come out of a desire to improve sauces, however. It’s a study from MIT’s Media Lab and the University of Texas at Austin aimed at understanding how to both improve and automate farming.
In the study, published today in PLOS ONE, the question being asked was whether a growing environment could find and execute a growing strategy that resulted in a given goal — in this case, basil with stronger flavors.
Such a task is one with numerous variables to modify — soil type, plant characteristics, watering frequency and volume, lighting and so on — and a measurable outcome: concentration of flavor-producing molecules. That means it’s a natural fit for a machine learning model, which from that variety of inputs can make a prediction as to which will produce the best output.
“We’re really interested in building networked tools that can take a plant’s experience, its phenotype, the set of stresses it encounters, and its genetics, and digitize that to allow us to understand the plant-environment interaction,” explained MIT’s Caleb Harper in a news release. The better you understand those interactions, the better you can design the plant’s lifecycle, perhaps increasing yield, improving flavor or reducing waste.
In this case the team limited the machine learning model to analyzing and switching up the type and duration of light experienced by the plants, with the goal of increasing flavor concentration.
A first round of nine plants had light regimens designed by hand based on prior knowledge of what basil generally likes. The plants were harvested and analyzed. Then a simple model was used to make similar but slightly tweaked regimens that took the results of the first round into account. Then a third, more sophisticated model was created from the data and given significantly more leeway in its ability to recommend changes to the environment.
To the researchers’ surprise, the model recommended a highly extreme measure: Keep the plant’s UV lights on 24/7.
Naturally this isn’t how basil grows in the wild, since, as you may know, there are few places where the sun shines all day long and all night strong. And the arctic and antarctic, while fascinating ecosystems, aren’t known for their flavorful herbs and spices.
Nevertheless, the “recipe” of keeping the lights on was followed (it was an experiment, after all), and incredibly, this produced a massive increase in flavor molecules, doubling the amount found in control plants.
“You couldn’t have discovered this any other way,” said co-author John de la Parra. “Unless you’re in Antarctica, there isn’t a 24-hour photoperiod to test in the real world. You had to have artificial circumstances in order to discover that.”
But while a more flavorful basil is a welcome result, it’s not really the point. The team is more happy that the method yielded good data, validating the platform and software they used.
“You can see this paper as the opening shot for many different things that can be applied, and it’s an exhibition of the power of the tools that we’ve built so far,” said de la Parra. “With systems like ours, we can vastly increase the amount of knowledge that can be gained much more quickly.”
If we’re going to feed the world, it’s not going to be done with amber waves of grain, i.e. with traditional farming methods. Vertical, hydroponic, computer-optimized — we’ll need all these advances and more to bring food production into the 21st century.
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Iron Ox opens its first fully autonomous farm
For the last two and a half years, Iron Ox has been working on perfecting its agricultural robots to tend its indoor farms. After first testing its systems on a small scale, the company is opening its first fully autonomous production farm, with plans to start selling its produce soon.
The farm is currently growing a number of leafy greens, including romaine, butterhead and kale, in addition to basil, cilantro and chives. The robots tending these plants are Angus, a 1,000-pound machine that can lift and move the large hydroponic boxes in which the produce is growing, and Iron Ox’s robotic arm for harvesting the produce.
As Iron Ox co-founder and CEO Brandon Alexander told me, the current setup can produce about 26,000 plants per year and is equivalent to a one-acre outdoor farm — though this one is obviously indoors and far more densely packed.
Alexander noted that he and his co-founder Jon Binney decided to get into indoor farming after working at a number of other robotics companies — for Alexander, that includes a stint at Google X — where the focus was often more on building cool technologies and not on how those robots could be used. “We’d seen lots of novelty robotics stuff and wanted to avoid that,” he told me. And while the founding team considered getting into warehouse logistics or drones, they eventually settled on farming because, as Alexander tells it, they didn’t just want to build a good business but also one that would create social good.
Today, the majority of leafy greens (the kind of produce that Iron Ox focuses on) in the U.S. are grown in California and Arizona — especially during the winter months when it’s colder in the rest of the country. That means a romaine lettuce that’s sold on the East Coast in January has often traveled more than 2,000 miles to get there. “That’s why we switched to indoors,” Alexander said. “We can decentralize the farm.”
It also helps that an indoor hydroponic farm can achieve 30 times the yield of an outdoor farm over the course of a year, yet uses far less space.
To get to this point where Iron Ox can operate an autonomous farm, though, took plenty of work and engineering chops. The hardest challenge, Alexander told me, was to get the robotic arm to look at the plants through its stereo cameras and then plan the pickup operation to harvest the produce, which isn’t always uniform. And to run this operation autonomously, it obviously has to do so reliably.
Angus, the larger robot that picks up the 800-pound pallets the produce is grown in and brings them to the robotic arm, also took some time to get right. You don’t want to move those pallets too quickly, after all, or you’ll have plenty of water to mop up.
All of that, including the system that monitors the plants, their growth, the sensors that watch over them and the hydroponics system, is then controlled from a cloud-based service that tells the robots when it’s time to harvest and which operations to perform. The robots themselves, though, then perform those tasks autonomously.
One thing that came as something of a surprise to the team, though, was that running an indoor farm solely with LED lighting still results in electricity bills that are simply too expensive to make the operation profitable. So going forward, Iron Ox is actually betting on more traditional greenhouses that are augmented by high-efficiency LED lighting.
That means the team can’t build these autonomous farms right in the city, though, because you can’t exactly stack a number of greenhouses on top of each other. But as Alexander noted, even if you have to be 20 miles outside of the city, that’s still far better than shipping produce to a supermarket that is thousands of miles away.
As Alexander stressed, the team spent a lot of time talking to both farmers and chefs to figure out what they needed. Farmers, it turned out, were mostly complaining about their inability to find labor. And that’s no surprise. The labor shortage in the agricultural industry is starting to become a major issue for farmers, especially in states like California. As for the chefs, what they were mostly looking for was quality, of course, but also predictability and consistent quality.
The plan now is to start selling the produce from the first farm and then scale to more and larger locations over time. Iron Ox now has the money to do so, given that it has raised more than $5 million in total, including a $3 million round it announced earlier this year.
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