February 6, 2018

German urban farming company Infarm announced that it has secured $25 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Balderton Capital, Europe’s largest early stage venture capital investor, with participation from TriplePoint Capital, Mons Investments LLC, Cherry Ventures, QUADIA, and LocalGlobe. Infarm has raised $35 million (€24M) to date, including a €2M grant from the European Commission.

Founded in 2013 by Osnat Michaeli and the brothers Erez and Guy Galonska, Infarm has pioneered a model that combines modular in-store vertical farms with IoT technologies and data science. By integrating each unit with Infarm’s central farming platform, the company can collect data on each location and create optimal growing environments that tailor light, temperature, pH, and nutrients. This enables each farming unit to efficiently produce up to 1,200 plants per month of dozens of varieties of herbs and leafy greens.

“We collect 50,000 data points throughout a plant’s lifetime,” Guy Galonska explained, “each farm acts as a data pipeline, sending information on plant growth to our platform 24/7 allowing it to learn, adjust, and optimize.”  Infarm currently has over 50 locations in the greater Berlin area, including top food retailers EDEKA and METRO, along with multiple restaurants.

Vertical Farming is a Growing Target for Investors

The Infarm round is just the latest in a series of high profile investments to have taken place in the space over the last six months, with the biggest splash being made by San Francisco-based Plenty, which in July of 2017  raised a record $200 million Series B  led by SoftBank Vision Fund.

Singapore-based Packet Greens, a high-tech automated, hydroponic vertical farming startup, recently closed on a US$1.5 million Seed round led by Spring SEEDS Capital – the venture capital arm of SPRING Singapore, an agency of the Ministry of Trade and Industry. Additionally, New Jersey-based  ‘post organic’ vertical farming startup Bowery Farming raised a total of $27.5 million, including a $20 million Series A.

Expansion in the Works

Like Plenty, Infam has its sights set on expanding far beyond its current footprint, with plans to launch operations in Paris, London, Copenhagen, and other German cities later this year. The company also will take steps to further expand the company’s product assortment to include tomatoes, chillies, a variety of mushrooms, fruits, and flowering vegetables.

“This is the beginning of the urban farming (r)evolution: it will redefine what it means to eat well, reshape the landscape of cities, and re-empower the people to take ownership of their food,” says Erez Galonska. “Our ambition is to reach cities as far as Seattle in the United States or Seoul, South Korea with our urban farming network.”

By David Nitchman, GAI Media