controlled-environment-agriculture
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Smallhold closed its farms. The mushrooms kept selling.
A Brooklyn startup made gourmet fungi a spectacle, then learned how expensive the spectacle could be. Its second act asks whether a national mushroom brand needs to own the farms.
The Robot Could Lift the Lettuce. Could the Business?
Iron Ox taught machines to ferry a thousand pounds of greens through sunlit greenhouses. Then the company discovered that farming has a harder engineering problem: making the numbers add up.
Mark Lodge and the Cold Art of Keeping Fresh Food Moving
For three decades, the British-born operator has worked behind the grocery shelf, turning perishable food into a repeatable system. At Gotham Greens, his old obsession with time, temperature and movement has found a greenhouse-sized stage.
Mike Zelkind Tried to Take the Weather Out of Farming
He built a farm like a factory, betting that software, sensors and stubborn operational discipline could shorten the distance between a seed and a salad. The experiment scaled across America - and ended by exposing the brutal economics beneath agriculture's most controlled environment.
Eitan Marder-Eppstein Put Warehouse Robots on Salad Duty
The roboticist who once taught machines to navigate offices is now giving them watering cans - and asking whether a greenhouse can compete with a field on price.
Gotham Greens
Gotham Greens is a Brooklyn-born indoor farming and fresh food company that grows pesticide-free leafy greens and herbs year-round in a national network of high-tech hydroponic greenhouses. Founded in 2009, it opened the first commercial rooftop greenhouse in the United States and has since scaled to more than a dozen facilities across nine states, producing roughly 100 million heads of lettuce a year using up to 90% less water and 97% less land than conventional field farming. Beyond greens, the company sells branded salad kits, dressings, dips and cooking sauces to more than 6,500 retail, restaurant and foodservice locations nationwide.
AEssenseGrows
AEssenseGrows is a Silicon Valley precision AgTech company that builds automated aeroponic 'SmartFarm' platforms for commercial indoor growers. Founded in 2014 by Robert Chen, the company pairs its AEtrium aeroponic hardware with Guardian Grow Manager software and Aerix LED lighting to deliver zero-pesticide, sensor-controlled cultivation - claiming up to 40% faster plant growth and repeatable, data-logged 'grow recipes' for cannabis and fresh-produce producers worldwide.
Hippo Harvest
Hippo Harvest is a California controlled-environment agriculture company that grows USDA-certified organic leafy greens inside greenhouses run by warehouse-style robots and machine learning. Founded by two veterans of the ROS robotics world, it repurposes Amazon-fulfillment-style autonomous mobile robots as 'tractors' that deliver water and nutrients plant-by-plant, claiming greens grown with roughly 92% less water, 55% less fertilizer and 94% less land than field agriculture - at prices meant to match outdoor-grown produce.
HarvestAi
HarvestAi is a Potsdam-based agritech company that builds AI software for high-tech greenhouses. Its web platform combines computer vision, machine learning and plant-physiology modeling to predict crop growth, harvest dates and yields, giving greenhouse operators forecasts that its team says exceed 90% accuracy. Growers use it to negotiate sales earlier, plan labor and logistics, and cut waste and energy costs. Founded in 2020 and led by CEO Dr. Georg Caspary, the company has raised roughly EUR 2.97M in seed funding and won first prize in Food/Agritech at Slush.
Oishii
Oishii is an American vertical farming company that grows premium, pesticide-free, Non-GMO strawberries indoors year-round. Founded in 2016 by Hiroki Koga and Brendan Somerville, it recreates the climate of Japan's strawberry-growing regions inside automated 'Smart Farms' to produce its flagship Omakase Berry, the Koyo Berry, the Nikko Berry, and the Rubi Tomato. Headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey, Oishii operates what it calls the world's largest indoor vertical strawberry farm and sells through Whole Foods and direct delivery across the Northeast and beyond.
Hiroki Koga
Hiroki Koga is the co-founder and CEO of Oishii, the New Jersey company that grows the Omakase Berry inside the world's largest indoor vertical strawberry farm. A Tokyo native who watched Japan's vertical-farming boom collapse a decade before he built his own, Koga bet on a fruit nobody else would touch - strawberries - because they were the hardest crop to grow at scale and the only one with the economics to matter. By recreating the climate of the Japanese Alps indoors and getting bees to pollinate at over 90% success, Oishii became the only player to produce pollinated fruit commercially, pesticide-free and year-round.