Indoor-farming platform Agrylist has grown (pun totally intended) quickly in the last few years. Founded in 2015, the Brooklyn-based company won TechCrunch’s Disrupt San Francisco Startup Battlefield that same year. It has experienced a 500 percent jump in revenue and customers since 2016, and in 2017 added 100 new customers to its roster.
Now the “virtual agronomist,” whose platform enables indoor farmers to better manage their crops, can add new investors to its list of accomplishments. Agrilyst announced this week, via TechCrunch, that it has raised a $1.5 million funding round from iSelect Fund, Argonautic Ventures, Horizons Lab, and Onlan Capital Fund. That brings the company’s total funding amount to $2.5 million.
Agrylist targets farms ranging in size from 10,000 square feet up to five acres. Its intelligence platform helps farmers manage the entire lifecycle of a crop, from seeding to harvest as well as post-harvest analysis of data.
Right now, Agrylist supports about 800 different crops (including insects and cannabis) Farmers use the platform to create seeding plans and planting schedules, compare crop predictions to actual yields, track crop weight, units, and location, and control indoor climate. Users can also set up daily task lists and reminders, much like you would in a project-management software platform.
An Agrylist-style farm is only one kind of indoor-farming method on the market, though. Greenhouses, hoophouses, and container farms are all versions of indoor farming, along with vertical farms, which are are steadily gaining popularity. NYC startup Farmshelf has been making its way into restaurants and retail shops, and last summer, Jeff Bezos and others invested $200 million in vertical farming startup Plenty.
Together, all of these versions of indoor farming now produce $14.8 billion annually in market value, a number which is expected to increase as the population continues to grow and technology gets cheaper and more available.
As Agrylist co-founder and CEO Allison Kopf noted in a recent blog post, indoor farming can usher in all sorts of efficiencies in agriculture, from finding ways to use less water to reducing waste to producing a greater amount of healthy foods (sorry, corn). With its latest funding injection, Agrylist, who plans to move into new markets and product lines, will hopefully be able to develop innovative answers to at least some of these problems.