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.
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.
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.