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Iron Ox

September 25, 2020

Revol Greens Raises $68M to Build Out High-Tech Greenhouses in the U.S.

Revol Greens announced today it has closed a $68 million funding round for its network of high-tech greenhouses the company says will eventually supply 33 million pounds of greens annually to the U.S. The round was led by Equilibrium Capital. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, this brings Revol’s total funding to $215 million.

The Minnesota-based company says it will use the new investment to launch its third facility, which is a 20-acre farm in Texas that could expand to 80 acres in the future. 

Revol is part of a new wave of companies marrying greenhouse growing with technology systems that allow food producers to grow crops year-round, in totally controlled environments. Its system uses closed-loop hydroponics and, when necessary, supplements natural sunlight with LEDs. It also collects data on plant growth to ensure crops have the correct levels of water and nutrients they need to grow.

As they’re based in Minnesota, the folks behind Revol are no strangers to the kind of extreme weather that makes growing crops outdoors impossible for parts of the year. But extreme weather is also a consequence of climate change, whether it’s fire, drought, or insect outbreaks, and it is becoming more widespread. In traditional agriculture, that could mean an increase in pests, flooding or heavy downpours that threaten crop yields, and increases in carbon dioxide that decrease the quality of products. 

Revol is not alone in merging the greenhouse with high tech to provide an alternative to traditional agriculture. AppHarvest is currently building out a massive greenhouse facility in Appalachia. The company recently raised $28 million. Iron Ox, which raised $20 million earlier this month, is bringing robotics to the greenhouse, and a company called Lufa has taken the greenhouse concept to rooftops in cities.

Getting greens closer to cities is also one of Revol’s goals. “High-tech greenhouses give us the ability to return to regional food systems with farms that produce our food near our communities,” David Chen, CEO of Equilibrium, said in today’s press release. “Regionalism gives us resiliency, food security, and addresses the threat of climate change to our food system. Greenhouses are the tech disruptor in a 10,000year-old agriculture sector.”

Revol CEO Mark Schulze added that by the end of 2021, the company will be “the world’s largest indoor lettuce producer.” 

The company’s first greenhouse launched in 2018 in its hometown of Owatonna, Minn., followed by a second facility in Tehachapi, Calif., which Revol is in the midst of building out.

September 10, 2020

Iron Ox Raises $20M Series B for More Robotic Greenhouses

Ag tech company Iron Ox, best known for its greenhouses powered by robotics and AI, announced this week it has raised a $20 million Series B round. The round was led by Pathbreak Ventures with participation from Amplify Partners, At One Ventures, Crosslink Capital, , ENIAC Ventures, R7 Partners, and Tuesday Ventures. Iron Ox’s total funding to-date including this round is $45 million.   

In addition to the funding news, Iron Ox also announced a new farming facility in California, this one in Gilroy. Like the company’s first greenhouse, which is located in San Carlos and opened in 2018, the Gilroy facility will use a hydroponic grow system manned not by humans but by a large mobile machine equipped with robotic grippers. The machine plants, harvests, and moves the heavy grow trays around as needed, while machine learning and computer vision systems monitor plant growth. Humans aren’t completely out of the equation, though: the system still needs them to prune and inspect plants. 

Unlike many other indoor farming operations, Iron Ox does not use LED lights, but instead relies on good ol’ fashioned sunlight for plant growth. For now, the farms grow the standard mixture of leafy greens and herbs. The new Gilroy farm will sell these greens to Whole Foods and Bianchinis markets in California. 

Some of the benefits high-tech greenhouses like those of Iron Ox bring include more efficient use of space and the ability to serve customers (the ones that can afford Whole Foods, at least) locally. Iron Ox also says it uses less water than traditional farming as well as less energy. 

The company joins AppHarvest, Lufa Farms, and Gotham Greens in making recent headlines around new developments and investments in large-scale, high-tech greenhouse farming.

October 4, 2018

Robots Run Iron Ox’s Indoor Farming Facility

The agricultural worker shortage means that many farms are turning to automation to assist with tasks like hauling equipment, precision weeding and even driving tractors. But startup Iron Ox is looking to take this to the next level by creating farms completely run by robots.

As MIT Technology Review reports, Iron Ox debuted its autonomous farm facility in San Carlos, CA yesterday. It’s an 8,000 square foot hydroponic facility that can grow up to 26,000 heads of leafy greens per year.

What sets Iron Ox apart from other indoor grow facilities is the robots. Big robots (carefully) move 800 pound water and plant-filled trays around the building, while mechanical arms transfer plants as they grow into larger hydroponic bays. All of this automated action is coordinated by a centralized “Brain” that monitors growing conditions and coordinates the movements of the robots.

For now, Iron Ox isn’t totally human-free. People are still required to seed and process crops, but the company plans to automate those tasks as well.

Iron Ox’s mission is to bring farming closer to cities, thus reducing the need to transport long distances. It’s certainly not alone in this mission. Projects like Square Roots and Freight Farms aim to do that as well, while CropOne is looking to build the largest indoor vertical farm in the world.

The other thing all these companies have in common in their crop: leafy greens. City dwellers better love their roughage, as a lot of it will be produced in these up and coming grow facilities.

Iron Ox is bringing a level of industrial automation to indoor farming, developing robots that can work around the clock, constantly monitoring, tending and raising crops. Coverage of the company’s launch did not include pricing, but one has to imagine that those hulking robots don’t come cheap, at least in terms of upfront costs. The question now is whether Iron Ox can get its robot-run facilities to a price that makes sense.

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