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vertical farming

October 1, 2019

Gordon Food Service and Square Roots Launch First Onsite Vertical Farm

Gordon Food Service, one of North America’s largest food distributors, and Kimball Musk’s indoor farming company Square Roots have officially launched one of the latter’s vertical farms onsite at the Gordon headquarters in Wyoming, Michigan.

The announcement, which the two companies made yesterday, follows news from March that Gordon and Square Roots were working together. The aim of the partnership is to build Square Roots Farms at or near Gordon distribution centers across North America. Food grown on the vertical farms will be available to Gordon’s corporate clients as well as individuals who buy from the company’s e-commerce store.

Square Roots farms, which are built inside shipping containers, pack a lot of produce into a very small amount of real estate. Case in point: the new farm at the Gordon HQ will take up less than two acres and is projected to produce more than 50,000 pounds of herbs and greens each year. Square Roots does this by growing plants vertically on panels and using a recipe of LED lighting and hydroponics controlled via software. As with many vertical farms, there’s no soil involved in the process.

“As our network of farms gets larger, it also gets smarter. Cloud-connected farms and data-empowered farmers learn from each other, enabling Square Roots to replicate success from one location to another, seamlessly,” Square Roots wrote in a recent blog post.

The partnership with Gordon also allows Square Roots to expand its Next-Gen Farmer Training Program, a one-year, all-paid entrepreneurial-meets-agricultural program that teaches younger adults both the tech and agricultural aspects of indoor vertical farming, with heavy emphasis on the former. As Square Roots opens more farming locations at Gordon distribution centers across the continent, it will be able to enlist more farmers to the program to man those locations. The number of new farmers varies based on the size of each location. Gordon, meanwhile, operates 175 distribution centers across North America.

So far, the farm at headquarters is the only one announced for Gordon, though more are planned for the future.

September 26, 2019

Intelligent Growth Solutions Raises an Additional £1.6M for Its Automated Vertical Farm Solution

Scotland-based agtech and lighting solutions company Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) announced today a further raise of £1.6 million (~$2 million USD) in what’s the second and final close of its Series A round. Agtech investor Ospraie Ag Sciences contributed the bulk of the funding, with participation from Agfunder. This brings IGS’s total Series A funding and total funding overall to £7 million.

In June, IGS raised a £5.4 million Series A round for its “farm in a box” indoor vertical farming system, which uses patented IoT tech to automate many aspects of running a vertical farm, from loading and moving grow trays to adjusting water levels and lighting to monitoring overall crop health.

In particular, the IGS system promises to help vertical farming companies bring down energy costs associated with LED lighting, one of the most expensive parts of running an indoor vertical farm. On its website, IGS says it can increase LED efficiency by up to 50 percent versus other indoor grow environments. The company has two patents in this area, one granted and the other pending.

IGS’s farm, located outside Dundee, is also Scotland’s first commercial vertical farm, and investor Ospraie’s first venture into that country as well as into the indoor farming market.

IGS said in a press release it will use the funds to “expand its market presence” through global sales operations for its lighting system, which the company expects to deploy in early 2020.

IGS will face plenty of competition as it expands in the vertical farming space. In 2019 so far, an Australian company called Vertical Farm Systems raised $1 million for its automated indoor farming technology and Eco Convergence Group rebranded as Kalera and broke ground on a massive vertical farm outside Orlando, FL. As well, there’s been plenty of movement from commercial vertical farm heavyweights like New Jersey-based AeroFarms as well as new entrants like Fifth Season, who just announced a robot-powered farm this week.

IGS’s key differentiator right now is its lighting system. As it deploys its solution in the next year, we’ll see if that’s enough to keep it at the top of the ever-rising competition in the vertical farming market.

September 24, 2019

Fifth Season Announces Robot-Powered Vertical Farm Near Pittsburgh

Indoor farming company Fifth Season today announced plans for its first commercial-scale vertical farm, which will open in early 2020 in Braddock, PA, an historic steel town near Pittsburgh.

To date, the company — originally founded as RoBotany Ltd. — has raised over $35 million. It incubated at Carnegie Mellon University’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship and currently has two test farms in Pittsburgh that supply greens to Giant Eagle and Whole Foods stores in the area, as well as to local restaurants. Fifth Season’s forthcoming new farm will grow over 500,000 pounds of lettuce in the first year of operation. The company plans to expand to additional locations throughout the U.S. in the future.

More importantly, the company, along with its cofounder and CEO Austin Webb, see robotics as a key element to vertical farming. Fifth Season uses a proprietary robotics and AI solution to assist in multiple areas of the vertical farm, from seeding to harvesting to packaging. While humans still work onsite at the farms, the bots take care of much of the heavy lifting — literally, in some cases. As AgFunder pointed out, with robots around, humans don’t have to climb multiple stories to get heavy grow trays with greens needing to be harvested.

Cutting down on this expensive labor could allow Fifth Season to offer its greens at more competitive prices in the future. “We have developed fully integrated, proprietary technology to completely control the hydroponic growing process and optimize key factors such as energy, labor usage and crop output,” Webb said in a statement, adding that the company’s “unprecedented low costs set a new standard for the future of the industry.”

We’re seeing more and more of these large-scale vertical farms that utilize automation to speed up tasks around the farm and also reduce labor costs. That includes fully autonomous systems, like Australia’s Vertical Farm Systems, or farms like Intelligent Growth Systems that use software to make vertical farming easier for those who don’t have an agricultural or engineering background. Kalera, who just broke ground on the Southeast’s largest vertical farm, is looking at fully automated solutions for future locations.

It’s far too soon to tell if any of these solutions will actually deliver the kinds of financial returns to help make vertical farming a more widespread reality, not to mention make it possible to price greens affordably in mainstream grocery retailers. Robots are one answer, and a promising one that that. We’ll need more data on what is and isn’t working, though, to better understand if they’re the entire future of vertical farming or one small piece of a much larger picture.

September 18, 2019

Is the Singapore Airlines-AeroFarms Deal an Anomaly or the Future of In-Flight Greens?

Singapore Airlines’ partnership with AeroFarms is cleared for takeoff. As of next month, the airline will offer AeroFarms leafy greens as part of the meals on its non-stop flight from NYC’s Newark airport to Singapore.

The two companies first announced the partnership in March of this year, and have been prepping for launch ever since.

AeroFarms, headquartered in New Jersey, grows different leafy greens using aeroponics that mist the roots of plants with nutrients, water, and oxygen. Like other forms of indoor farming, there is no soil or sunlight required to grow the plants. AeroFarms is considered something of a heavyweight in the vertical farming space, having been named to Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list in 2019. The company also just raised $100 million in fresh funding in July.

Right now, greens farmed indoors via aeroponics or hydroponics is a trendy topic in the food world, and a popular purchase item among those with some disposable income. Given that, it’s something of a no-brainer that Singapore Airlines — known for its ridiculously upscale experience — would be the first airline to start carrying these products. The NYC-to-Singapore flight is also the longest nonstop flight in the world and done with the Airbus A350-900, a massive, ultra-long-range plane built to accommodate lengthy flights that require multiple meals for passengers. Since this trip in particular is all about the premium travel experience (there’s not even an economy class), Singapore Airlines already offers passengers perks like a nutrition-focused menu designed by wellness folks at Canyon Ranch spa. Vertically grown greens fit right in.

As to whether such greens will show up on the average flight between, say Toledo and San Antonio, the answer is, probably not.

Companies are still trying to find ways to scale vertical farming operations to meet greater demand, but from both a spacial and economical perspective, that hasn’t happened yet. As well, most domestic flights have neither the time nor the money to offer full meals, let alone gourmet ones. When there’s any food on offer, it’s usually vacuum-sealed or shrink-wrapped. It was certainly not chosen by nutritionists at a spa.

So if you’re planning on splurging for a Singapore airlines flight in the near future, let us know how the greens taste with your dinner. For the rest of us, a $5 can of Pringles will have to do.

September 10, 2019

Verdeat Delays Kickstarter Launch for Its Hydroponic Garden System

Poznań, Poland-based company Verdeat sent a message out today stating the launch of its hydroponic garden system for the home has been delayed one week, until September 17.

When it finally arrives, Verdeat’s product will be an indoor hydroponic grow system controlled by a smartphone app and designed to fit inside your house or apartment. Like a growing number of at-home hydroponic systems, Verdeat automates much of the grow process, calculating how much water, light, and nutrients plants need and requiring human intervention only once every few weeks. The device will be available in small, medium, or large sizes and, depending on that size, can hold up to 76 plants. Verdeat has not yet released pricing details for any of the unit sizes.

The campaign, which was announced in June of this year, was originally supposed to launch in July. This morning’s message had this to say about the delays:

As you know perfecting a prototype can be very time consuming and we want to make sure the product will be worthy of Kickstarter backers before it is released.

In the same message, the company also said it wants to make Verdeat as eco-friendly as possible, with minimal negative environmental impact by offset CO2 emissions from shipping products by contributing to the UN emission reduction program.

While Verdeat’s campaign delays are a little eyebrow-raising, they’re not necessarily bad news. Hardware products, in particular, are susceptible to all kinds of production issues that can hamper progress. As the recent mystery surrounding the state of the Rite Press shows, many a Kickstarter campaign has been marred by companies gladly taking a crowd’s funding but never actually delivering the product. Better to delay a campaign launch by a few weeks than wind up with no product at all for your backers.

And hopefully, these delays mean that when the campaign finally launches next week, Verdeat will have a higher-quality, more eco-friendly product to show off.

August 21, 2019

Newsletter: Are Vertical Farms Ready to Grow More Than Lettuce?

Greetings from the South, ground zero for sweet tea, land of unrelenting humidity, future home of a massive new vertical farming operation.

This week, an Orlando, FL-based company called Kalera (formerly Eco Convergence Group), announced that it has broken ground on a semi-autonomous vertical farming facility that will produce 5 million heads of lettuce each year, supplying Orlando and central Florida restaurants, hotels, and grocery stores with fresh greens and underscoring the growing demand for locally grown produce.

As soon as I got the news, the usual question about vertical farming entered my brain: why is it always lettuce? From Kalera’s new operation to AeroFarms’ 70,000-square-foot New Jersey farm to IGS’ fully automated vertical farm, we hear lots of talk of leafy greens, herbs, and the occasional edible flower. But nobody’s yet growing eggplant, potato, or even carrots.

Kalera’s CEO and cofounder, Cristian Toma, had a lot to say about that when I asked him about this: Unlike lettuce — short plants that can be densely packed together to maximize volume — many other types of produce need lots of space to grow upwards and outwards. In some cases they require multiple harvests. Most of them need human hands to assist with things like pruning, and all of these needs add up to the kinds of space and labor costs vertical farms simply can’t sustain right now. Not at scale, anyway.

That doesn’t mean we won’t see more non-leafy greens in vertical farms at some point in the future. As I noted this morning:

Whether the day ever comes when we’ll see vertical farms growing, say, carrots, depends a lot on developments in plant science in the future. “The varieties we are working with right now over many many years evolved to meet the challenges for outdoor production,” says Toma. “We don’t have varieties bred specifically for indoor production yet. So that’s an area where the industry can develop.”

Image courtesy of Princeton University

Princeton Vertical Farming Project Shutters Its Doors — For Now

More data on growing methods might help. That’s been the credo of Paul P.G. Gauthier, former associate research scholar in plant physiology and environmental plant metabolism at Princeton University and the founder of the Princeton Vertical Farming Project.

Unfortunately, word got out late last week that PVFP has closed its doors following Gauthier’s departure from the university. We shouldn’t shutter the conversation on his ideas, however, especially those around the use of data in vertical farms. Back in January, Gauthier told The Spoon that the vertical farming industry needs more data on best practices for growing plants that can be shared around the industry in a kind of open-source framework. More data on what’s working and what isn’t could give us a more realistic idea of whether, say, tomatoes are a realistic crop to grow at large scale or if they’re better off in a greenhouse setting.

Gauthier has taken a job as Professor of Plant Science at Delaware Valley University and said he hopes to reproduce the vertical farm model from Princeton on a larger scale, and that there’s a possibility of even reviving the PVFP at Princeton in the future.

Starship’s Autonomous Delivery Bots Land on Another Campus

While vertical farms move closer to automation, more automated delivery bots are also moving onto college campuses. Starship upped the number of food delivery robots this week by announcing that its bots have landed at the University of Pittsburgh and Purdue University, joining campuses like George Mason University and Northern Arizona University, both of whom launched delivery programs with Starship earlier this year.

Starship is one of a few companies testing delivery programs with these small, wheeled bots. Kiwi, too, has bots on a number of campuses — including, possibly Purdue, a potential overlap that suggests campus is the next battleground for autonomous delivery. It is, after all, the perfect testing ground: as my colleague Chris Albrecht noted when he tested out a Kiwi earlier this year, college campuses are an ideal piloting ground for these companies: “Colleges are contained geographic areas with lots of hungry people ordering food from on-campus or nearby establishments well into the night,” he wrote.

Personally, I’m waiting for the day a six-wheeled autonomous bot can deliver a hydroponically grown baked potato to my doorstep, but if the economics of vertical potato farms don’t pan out, I’d always settle for lettuce.

Stay cool,
Jenn

July 9, 2019

Vertical Farming Heavyweight AeroFarms Raises $100M in Fresh Funding

Vertical farming startup AeroFarms has raised a $100 million Series E round to expand its warehouse facilities that hold massive indoor farms, and explore new types of produce it can grow in those facilities, according to The Financial Times. The round was led by Ingka Group (IKEA’s parent comany), with participation from existing investors Wheatsheaf and ADM Capital as well as Mission Point Capital, GSR Ventures, and AllianceBernstein. The round brings AeroFarms total funding to $238 million.

The company previously worked with IKEA Group, as well as Momofuku Group’s David Chang, to close a $40 million Series D round in 2017. And in 2019 alone, AeroFarms has doubled down on its efforts to spread the use of vertical farming, including closing a partnership with Singapore Airlines to provide fresh greens in flight and landing on FastCompany’s 2019 Most Innovative Companies list.

AeroFarms is also part of a group called the Precision Indoor Plants Consortium, which is working to develop crops specifically meant for indoor growing. The group focuses on optimizing flavor and other elements about the plants themselves, rather than the hardware or software used to grow them.

But with a vertical farming market predicted to grow to 9.96 billion worldwide by 2025, AeroFarms isn’t the only one looking to move beyond leafy greens. In June, Plenty, who previously received a $200 million investment from Softbank, announced it too was looking to add things like strawberries, tomatoes, and potentially more exotic plants to its grow systems. Freight Farms, whose Leafy Green Machine has helped pioneer the concept of farming in a shipping container, also went into detail earlier this year about how it’s rearchitecting its own farming concept to in part accommodate growing a bigger variety of crops.

Will we see carrots and root vegetables making their way to shipping containers and warehouses in the near future? Probably not right away, as it’s expensive and complex from both a space and cost perspective to grow these heartier crop varieties. But the level of interest AeroFarms, Plenty, and others now express in growing more than just kale suggests we’re well on our way to that point. A hefty investment doesn’t hurt, either.

June 26, 2019

Verdeat Is Launching a Kickstarter for Its Hydroponic Garden System For the Home

Poznań, Poland-based company Verdeat announced this week it will launch a Kickstarter campaign in July for its modular vertical farm meant to fit inside apartments, offices, and other non-commercial spaces.

Like other indoor hydroponic grow systems, Verdeat is able to cultivate most plants without the use of soil, though unlike a lot of systems, the 35 cm cylindrical device will still accommodate soil in certain configurations. The modular trays that come with the device can be switched out based on what you’re trying to grow, whether seeds and sprouts, which get planted in a substrate (like coconut fiber), or a potted basil plant you nabbed at the grocery store.

The entire system is controlled by a smartphone app that takes the majority of the guesswork out of the growing process, from knowing how much water to give each type of plant to how to adjust the LEDs to produce the right amount of sun-like light. The user simply fills the grow tray, adds some nutrients, and starts the app, which, according to an email from Verdeat, can run the farm more or less autonomously, only requiring the user to add nutrients every one to three weeks depending on the plants. The company also claims that plants in the Verdeat system grow faster and ripen 40 percent sooner than traditionally grown herbs and vegetables. At the moment, Verdeat’s system can grow the usual selection of herbs and leafy greens found in most vertical farms, as well as strawberries, peppers, blueberries, and other fruits.

Once the Kickstarter campaign launches, backers will be able to choose from a small, medium, or large device, depending on their individual space requirements. Remember earlier this year when The Spoon looked at vertical farms that would fit into closet-sized apartments? Verdeat definitely fits that criteria. It’s also reminiscent of the self-watering, hydroponic farm-in-a-pillar Zooey Deschanel is currently selling via her startup Lettuce Grow, and of Seedo, whose self-contained, airtight farm looks like a mini fridge.

In fact, with the vertical farming market expected to be worth $9.96 billion by 2025, we’ll see many more of these at-home versions of the vertical farm surfacing alongside more industrial-sized, hyper-automated counterparts.

How Verdeat fares amid all this competition will depend largely on some factors the company hasn’t yet released, including the cost of each device unit, how widely available it will be (it’s manufactured in the EU), and how long backers will have to wait before they can actually get their hands on the device and start growing. If they get their hands on it: As we’ve seen with other crowdfunded hardware projects, there is always the possibility that the product might not make it to market as promised. But perhaps manufacturing right there in the EU, will make it easier for Verdeat to keep tabs on the process and avoid those pitfalls.

The Kickstarter campaign will launch at the very beginning of July.

June 20, 2019

Plenty’s New Vertical Farm Wants to Put Exotic Produce in Your Grocery Store

San Francisco-based vertical farming startup Plenty today unveiled some first glimpses of its new farm, Tigris.

According to a press release, the farm will focus on enhancing the flavor of crops as well as widening the variety of fruits and vegetables it and most other vertical farms currently produce.

That includes adding not just strawberries and tomatoes to the mix, but also foods that aren’t necessarily standards in the average American grocery store. “There are 70,000 edible fruit and vegetable varieties in the world, and because of the challenges of growing outdoors and putting food on trucks, we’ve been relegated to eat the few dozen that we find at the grocery store,” Plenty cofounder and chief science officer Nate Storey said in the release.

While Plenty didn’t name specifics, there’s plenty of produce that rarely reaches U.S. shores either because of regulations around potential pests or simply the wear and tear travel puts on the foods.

Plenty will probably not be growing cucamelon or cloud berries any time soon, but Storey’s comment does highlight that potential role for vertical farms.

That said, right now the company is still focused on leafy greens and creating the perfect “recipe” — that is, nutrients, climate, and water usage — to enhance flavor. Plenty currently grows and sells things like kale, beet leaves, arugula, and fennel.

The company nabbed a $200 million Series B investment in 2017 from the likes of Softbank CEO, Masayoshi Son, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Plenty’s current total funding as of this writing is $226 million.

In 2018, Plenty had announced it was building 300 vertical farms across China, where the market for vertical farming is significantly increasing.

Tigris, meanwhile, is currently undergoing its food-safety certification. Currently, customers can buy Plenty greens in San Francisco at a number of local stores, as well as online at Good Eggs. Plenty says Tigris greens will become more widely available later this year.

June 18, 2019

Intelligent Growth Solutions Raises £5.4M Series A Round for its Automated Vertical Farm

Dundee, Scotland-based vertical farming system Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) announced today it has raised a £5.4 million Series A funding round led by U.S.-based S2G Ventures, with participation from online venture capital firm AgFunder and the Scottish Investment Bank (SIB). The round accounts for IGS’ total funding to date.

As do an increasing number of vertical farming systems on the market today, IGS’ platform is a so-called plug-and-play system, meaning the user interfaces with software which automates much of the grow process for a variety of crops. (Admittedly, it’s still mostly leafy greens at this point.) IGS’ patented, IoT-enabled system includes dynamic LEDs that can automatically adjust themselves to suit crop needs, trays that are loaded and moved by machines, and the ability to water and monitor crops via software — all with the press of a button.

Here’s the farm in action:

Explore IGS' automated vertical farming system

The farm, which is located just outside the coastal city of Dundee, is Scotland’s first vertical farm in operation. According to the press release, the new funds will go towards creating more jobs at IGS in areas like software development, robotics, engineering, and automation. Some of the funds will also go towards product development and marketing.

Many companies are currently bringing versions of the automated vertical farm to the fold. Earlier this year an Australian agtech company simply called Vertical Farming Systems raised $1 million for its automated indoor farm system. Liberty Produce, based in the U.K., has a “one-stop-shop” vertical farm which anyone can operate, even those without a technical or agricultural background.

And that’s part of what’s at the center of these automated farming systems. By making it easier to plant, monitor, and harvest crops, vertical farming companies around the world are hoping to take some of the guesswork out of the process and in turn deliver more consistent crop yields and higher-quality greens, saving on time and labor costs in the process. Because of current limitations around scalability and the kinds of crops farmers can grow at scale, vertical farming won’t replace traditional agriculture anytime soon, but automated farms like those from IGS will play an important role in the future of farming, and we’ll see a lot more systems like this in the near future.

June 10, 2019

Ocado Makes a Step Beyond Groceries With Two New Indoor Farming Ventures

Ocado has thus far made a name for itself in the world of online grocery delivery and fulfillment, but new moves see the company stepping out of the supermarket and into the farm — the indoor farm, to be exact.

One such move is Ocado’s announcement that it will partner with Dutch firm Priva and U.S.-based 80 Acres to create a new vertical farming company called Infinite Acres.

According to a press release, Infinite Acres will create a turn-key indoor farming solution meant to grow year-round produce close to densely populated urban areas. The idea is in keeping with many indoor and/or vertical farming initiatives out there now: get greens to the grocery store on the same day they’re harvested.

The company will design and install fully automated farms with custom LEDs, finely tuned climate controls, and other software tools that match clients’ specific needs around things like location and crop selection. Additionally, 80 Acres Farms will send its own growers to operate the farm, from managing the tech platform to harvesting the actual food.

80 Acres already offers an automated indoor farming platform to U.S. farmers, while Priva makes hardware and software tools aimed at better indoor climate control, water conservation, and energy savings.

Where UK-based Ocado comes in is with its tech know-how around things like predictive analytics, logistics, and automation. The company is known in the U.S. for its ongoing partnership with Kroger, with which it operates warehouses full of smart robots that can pack groceries and handle other food-related tasks.

In terms of involvement in vertical farming, Infinite Acres is just the start. Company CEO Tim Steiner noted in the press release that Ocado hopes to “co-locate vertical farms within or next to our Customer Fulfillment Centres and Ocado Zoom’s micro-fulfillment centres so that we can offer the very freshest and most sustainable produce that could be delivered to a customers’ kitchen within an hour of it being picked.”

No word yet on whether robots will be scurrying around those farms in future, though that wouldn’t be so surprising given the level of automation companies are trying to pack into indoor farms nowadays. Infinite Acres will join the likes of Liberty Produce and Australia’s VFS in trying to automate as many aspects of the indoor farm as possible.

Ocado also announced today it had purchased a majority stake in vertical farming company Jones Foods Co., and will use its tech to improve efficiency in the grow process and possibly even integrate the system with Ocado Zoom, for delivery. Jones Foods Co. is Europe’s largest operating vertical farm, with the capacity to grow 420 tons of leafy greens per year. Ocado’s investment in the company could mean Steiner’s aforementioned vision of co-locating vertical farms near Ocado fulfillment centers will become a reality in the near future.

May 22, 2019

Agrylist Raises $8M Series A for Data-Driven Indoor Farming, Rebrands as Artemis

Artemis, formerly known as the indoor-farming company Agrylist, announced today an $8 million Series A round. According to a press release via email, the round was co-led by Astanor Ventures and Talis Capital, with participation from New York State’s Empire State Development Fund and iSelect Fund. The latter two companies are existing investors. The new funding round brings Artemis’ total funding to $11.75 million.

As well as raising new funds, the company has retired the Agrylist moniker and rebranded as Artemis. A new website and new corporate branding are slated for June 2019, according to the press announcement.

Artemis, which was founded in 2015 and is based in Brooklyn, NY, helps indoor farmers better manage the lifecycle of their crops through a proprietary system it refers to as an “enterprise cultivation management platform.” In one interface, which can integrate with existing software tools, the system will help farmers create planting schedules, control the indoor climate, track crop health, detect food-safety issues, and manage labor costs. The system also comes packaged with basic project-management capabilities like to-do lists and daily reminder features.

Increasingly, indoor farmers are turning to these kinds of “one-stop-shop” products to help them make large-scale indoor farming economically feasible and in doing so ensure more consistent production and higher crop yields. Some systems, like those from Liberty Produce and Freight Farms, also bundle hardware like LEDs and the actual grow panels into their end-to-end systems.

Artemis, for now at least, seems more focused on the data aspect of large-scale indoor farming. Gathering useful data on crops and farming operations can help companies not only better monitor crop health, but also help them measure productivity and labor costs, and ensure they’re in line with certain compliance standards.

Even more important, more data could tell us where indoor farming could stand to be more efficient, if indeed it’s efficient at all right now. As Paul P.G. Gauthier explained to me last year, the indoor farming industry tends to claim things that aren’t necessarily backed up by data at the moment. We need more information that can tell us, for example, how much water something like hydroponics actually uses, and where the waste water from those types of operations go.

These are no doubt questions Artemis is tackling, too, as it continues to build out its product. According to the company, the new funding will go towards expanding the Artemis team in product, marketing, engineering, and sales areas, as well as towards scaling sales.

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