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If you think growing leaves is easy, think again.
Lettuce isn’t the most challenging crop in the world, but as any farmer knows, a lot of problems emerge between planting and harvest. The range runs from pests to pathogens and rainfall – both too little and too much.
To protect the tender greenery from the cruel world, many growers have taken their crops indoors – huge greenhouses or huge warehouses have become the new homes for all types of crops. But demons lurk indoors too, and lately they’ve become of the profit-loss variety. Actually more harm than good.
Indoor farming startups have been the darlings of the startup world in recent years, with their tech-forward focus attracting nearly $3 billion in investment from 2012 to 2022. crunchbase, Yet, funding to the sector has declined over the past year: app harvest And fifth season Both have filed for bankruptcy; Iron Ox removed about half its staff, And Bowery Farming Underwent layoffs and saw its valuation downgraded by Fidelity.
With such adverse conditions, it would appear that the region is headed for a dust bowl.
However, there are some green shoots. Hippo Harvest recently raised a $21 million Series B on the back of its repurposed warehouse robots, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
Additionally, according to PitchBook, the round valued the startup, post-money, at $145 million — a healthy step up from its previous $42 million valuation. The round was led by Standard Investments, with participation from Congruent Ventures, Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, Hawthorne Food Ventures, and Energy Impact Partners.
In some ways, Hippo Harvest is like its competitors: It’s hoping it can grow food more efficiently, using less land and water. But what sets it apart in the field is the fact that it is more of a robot startup than an indoor farming company.
Many indoor farming companies rely on automation. Computers control everything from heat and humidity to nutrient levels in hydroponic systems. Trays filled with ripe produce move along the tracks so they can be harvested.
“If you went into an Amazon warehouse 15 years ago, you would see something that really looked like today’s greenhouse: pneumatics, gantry systems, lots of fixed processes,” Eitan Marder-Epstein, CEO of Hippo Harvest, told TechCrunch. “Automation.”
But Amazon warehouses look completely different now. Robots run around, moving entire shelves of merchandise from one location to another, optimizing the layout based on demand.
Those robots have become so widely used that they have become commoditized, Marder-Epstein said. “We saw an opportunity to say, ‘Hey, what if we took those robots and turned them into tractors for our greenhouses?'” he said.
This is a decision that will shape the entire company. “We went back to a time when that was how nurseries were managed. It’s really old-fashioned, with a guy walking around carrying a water container. But now we have found a robot that can do it.”
The robots also allow Hippo Harvest to run more experiments and gather data for its machine learning algorithms. When Marder-Epstein and his co-founder Wim Meeusen began studying greenhouses, they said they ran into a problem: “These systems work on these big recirculating plumbing loops,” Marder-Epstein said.
The shared loop meant they didn’t know how much nutrients individual plants were getting, and they couldn’t keep each plant’s microbiome separate from the others (plants rely on their own microbiomes to make the most of the nutrients available to them. depend a lot). Such a setup would severely limit the number of experiments they could run.
So instead of placing plants in the same shared hydroponic loop, Hippo Harvest houses them in separate cells within a three-foot-square module. That separation not only allowed greenhouses to test more variables, but it also inadvertently solved a problem that plagues hydroponic greenhouse operators: pathogens that rapidly spread through shared loops and throughout the crop. Let’s kill.
In the Hippo Harvest greenhouse, plant modules sit atop a grid of pillars and are separated by short aisles. Robots make their way beneath the flats, popping into the streets to deliver water and nutrients and collect data. When the plants are mature, they pick up the flats and take them to warehouse operators for harvesting.
Hippo Harvest is moving away from a vertical farm to a greenhouse in an attempt to save capital and operating expenses. (Vertical farms require more intensive lighting, heating, and ventilation.)
The company says it can grow vegetables using 92% less water, 55% less fertilizer and no pesticides than conventional agriculture, although it does not disclose the carbon footprint of its operations. Currently, its greenhouses are heated with natural gas, although Marder-Epstein said the company is committed to being net zero by 2040.
Hippo Harvest’s product is currently for sale in California through Amazon Fresh and at some small stores throughout the state, including Mar-Val and Gus’s Community Market. The company plans to remain focused on the Golden State while it uses its Series B funding to scale operations.
If Hippo Harvest is successful, it will reverse this trend, which will no doubt make its investors happy. Indoor agriculture has fallen on hard times, but its potential has proven too attractive for some people to ignore. Indoor farms promise to reduce water use, no small feat in an era of major droughts, and bring production closer to homes and restaurants, reducing transportation costs and emissions.
Now, they just have to rein in costs, and Hippo Harvest hopes its repurposed robots will do just that.
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