indoor-farming
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Oren Falkowitz and the distance between a problem and its solution
He helped build Area 1 Security around stopping phishing before it reached the inbox. Now Oren Falkowitz is bringing farms closer to the people who eat what they grow.
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.
Robert Chen Has Spent 45 Years Teaching Machines to Pay Attention. Now They’re Watching Plants.
The AEssenseGrows founder built his career around sensors, software and machines that notice what people cannot. His latest bet puts that same discipline to work in the root zone.
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.
Georg Caspary
Georg Caspary is the founder and CEO of HarvestAi, a Potsdam-based deeptech company that uses machine learning and computer vision to forecast harvest dates and yields in commercial greenhouses growing tomatoes, peppers and strawberries. A former World Bank economist and fundraising lead with degrees from Oxford, the LSE, Sciences-Po Paris and MIT, he spent two decades on environmental and agricultural finance across more than 20 countries before turning his attention to the unglamorous but high-stakes problem of knowing exactly how many tomatoes a greenhouse will produce, and when. HarvestAi has raised over $3 million, won first prize in Food/Agritech at Slush, and runs pilots in Germany, the Netherlands and Canada.
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.