hydroponics
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Brandon Alexander and the long way back to the farm
He left Google’s drone program to ask farmers what they needed. The answer took Brandon Alexander from a California road trip to robot greenhouses - and into the difficult business of changing how food is grown.
80 Acres Farms grew the salad. Could it grow the business?
It put farming under LEDs, brought greens to national grocery shelves, and kept building. Then the money stopped. The rise and wind-down of 80 Acres Farms reveal the distance between growing a crop and sustaining a company.
Pierre-Antoine Mariage and the long game of growing roots
Before Botalys could grow rare plants indoors, Pierre-Antoine Mariage had to grow a company around an experiment. His story runs through patient research, a complementary partnership and the expensive distance between a promising prototype and a working factory.
Viraj Puri and the Shorter Journey of a Basil Leaf
A dinner in Brooklyn helped send Viraj Puri into rooftop farming. After building Gotham Greens into a national food business, he now guides the company from a different seat.
Bowery Farming grew the salad. Could it grow the business?
Bowery put leafy greens under LEDs, taught software to tend them, and reached grocery shelves. Its 2024 closure exposed the expensive distance between a working farm and a working business.
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.
BOTALYS
BOTALYS is a Belgian botanical-ingredients company that grows rare medicinal plants, starting with Korean ginseng, inside one of Europe's largest indoor vertical farms. Using a proprietary Biomimetic Indoor Farming method, it recreates the harsh wild conditions that make plants build up active compounds, harvesting ginseng in months rather than years and producing roots with unusually high concentrations of ginsenosides. Its ultra-pure, standardized extracts - led by the HRG80 ginseng ingredient - supply nutraceutical, cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies looking for traceable, contaminant-free botanicals.
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.
Pierre-Antoine Mariage
Pierre-Antoine Mariage is the founder and CEO of Botalys, a Belgian agtech company that grows rare medicinal plants like Korean ginseng and Fjord Rhodiola indoors using a proprietary hydroponic technology, supplying ultra-pure botanical ingredients to the nutraceutical, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industries.
Alex Tyink
Alex Tyink is the founder and CEO of Fork Farms, a Green Bay, Wisconsin food-access technology company behind the Flex Farm, a mobile indoor hydroponic system that grows up to 25 pounds of leafy greens a month in nine square feet. A trained opera singer from Appleton who studied voice at Northwestern, he traded a New York vocal-performance career for urban farming after volunteering at a Brooklyn rooftop garden in 2010. Fork Farms now works with more than 5,000 schools, hospitals, food pantries and companies across all 50 states and dozens of countries, and closed a $2 million Series A in 2021.
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.
Fork Farms
Fork Farms is a mission-first agriculture technology company in Green Bay, Wisconsin that builds self-contained indoor vertical hydroponic systems - led by the Flex Farm - paired with a digital platform (Farmative) and K-12 curriculum. Its technology lets schools, hospitals, nonprofits, food pantries, businesses and homes grow hundreds of pounds of fresh produce per year on-site using a fraction of the water and land of conventional agriculture, turning food access into something anyone can do indoors.