Amazing! See How Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Revolutionized Hippo Harvest’s Lettuce Growth, Resulting in $21 Million Investment

If you think growing leaves is easy, think again.

Lettuce isn't the most challenging crop in the world, but as any farmer knows, many problems arise between planting and harvesting. The range runs from pests to pathogens to rain, both too much and too much.

To protect tender vegetables from the cruel world, many growers have brought their crops indoors: sprawling greenhouses or bustling warehouses have become new homes for all kinds of crops. But demons also lurk within, and recently they have been of the profit-and-loss variety. In reality, more losses than gains.

Indoor farming startups have been darlings of the startup world in recent years, with their technological focus attracting about $3 billion in investments between 2012 and 2022, according to crispy base. However, in the last year, funding for the sector has weakened: app harvest and Fifth season both have declared bankruptcy; Iron Ox fired almost half of its staff; and Bowery Agriculture went through rounds of layoffs and saw its valuation slashed by Fidelity.

With headwinds like that, it would seem the sector is headed toward a dustbin.

There are some green shoots though. Hippo harvest It recently raised a $21 million Series B on the back of its repurposed warehouse robots, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.

What's more, the round values ​​the startup, after cash, at $145 million, according to PitchBook, a healthy step up from its previous valuation of $42 million. 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 hopes to grow food more efficiently using less land and water. But what sets it apart in this space is the fact that it's more of a robot startup than an indoor farming company.

Many indoor farming businesses rely on automation. Computers control everything from heat and humidity to nutrient levels in hydroponic systems. Trays full of ripe produce slide along the tracks so they can be harvested.

“If you walked into an Amazon warehouse 15 years ago, you'd see something that actually looked a lot like today's greenhouses: pneumatics, gantry systems, a lot of fixed process automation,” Hippo Harvest CEO Eitan Marder told TechCrunch. -Eppstein.

But Amazon's warehouses now look completely different. Robots run around moving entire shelves of merchandise from one place to another, optimizing the layout based on demand.

Those robots have become so widely used that they have become commodities, Marder-Eppstein said. “We saw this opportunity to say, 'Hey, what if we took those robots and turned them into tractors for our greenhouses?'” he said.

It's a decision that would shape the entire company. “We go back to the way daycares used to be run. It's truly old school, with a person with a watering can walking around. But now we have a robot that can do that.”

The robots also allow Hippo Harvest to conduct more experiments and collect data for its machine learning algorithms. When Marder-Eppstein and his co-founder Wim Meeussen began studying greenhouses, they said they kept running into a problem: “These systems work with these large recirculating loops of pipes,” Marder-Eppstein said.

The shared circuit meant they didn't know how many nutrients individual plants were receiving and couldn't keep each plant's microbiome separate from the others (plants rely heavily on their microbiome to make the most of available nutrients). Such a setup would have severely limited the number of experiments they could perform.

So instead of plants being in the same shared hydroponic circuit, Hippo Harvest places them in individual cells within three-foot-square modules. That separation not only allowed the greenhouse to test more variables, but it also inadvertently solved a problem that vexes hydroponic greenhouse operators: pathogens that spread quickly through the shared circuit and kill an entire crop.

In a Hippo Harvest greenhouse, plant modules are placed on top of a grid of posts and separated by small walkways. Robots make their way beneath floors and appear in hallways to deliver water and nutrients and collect data. When the plants are mature, they lift the plants and take them to the warehouse operators for harvesting.

Hippo Harvest is sticking with greenhouses, eschewing vertical farming in an attempt to save on capital and operating expenses. (Vertical farms require more intensive lighting, heating and ventilation.)

The company says it can grow vegetables using up to 92% less water, 55% less fertilizer and no pesticides compared to traditional farming, although it does not disclose the carbon footprint of its operations. Currently, its greenhouses are heated with natural gas, although Marder-Eppstein said the company is committed to reaching net zero emissions by 2040.

Hippo Harvest products are currently on sale in California through Amazon Fresh and in a few smaller stores across the state, including Mar-Val and Gus's Community Market. The company plans to stay focused on the Golden State while using its Series B financing to expand its operations.

If Hippo Harvest is successful, it will buck the trend, no doubt to the delight of its investors. Indoor farming has hit a rough patch, but its potential has proven too attractive for some to ignore. Indoor farms promise to reduce water use—no small feat in an era of megadroughts—and bring produce production closer to homes and restaurants, cutting transportation costs and emissions.

Now, all they have to do is control costs, and Hippo Harvest hopes its repurposed robots will do just that.