October 17, 2017

Kurt Kelty, the former director of battery technology for Tesla, has joined vertical farming startup Plenty Inc. as the senior vice president of operations and market development.

After being with Tesla since 2006, it was announced at the beginning of August that Kelty was leaving the company just as Tesla released its first issue of Model 3 vehicles. Production of the less expensive Model 3 began in July, with the company targeting production of 20,000 per month by December. Kelty was a Tesla veteran, being with the company for more than 10 years, and was a key player in the establishment of the first Gigafactory in Nevada, after having been with the Energy Lab at Panasonic for 14 years.

“We can confirm that Kurt Kelty has left the company to explore new opportunities and we want to thank him for everything he’s done for Tesla,” the company said in a statement reported Bloomberg.

Now Kelty is bringing his technological expertise to application within the agtech space.

“At Tesla I was employee number fifty or sixty,” Kelty told Bloomberg. “It’s a very different company from when I joined. I wanted to figure out where I would contribute to the next big wave. I see my next 10-year-run as growing Plenty.”

Founded in 2014 by Matt Barnard and Nate Storey, Plenty is headquartered in a 52,000 square-foot facility in San Francisco. There it grows leafy greens including purple Siberian kale, red leaf lettuce, sorrel, and varieties of basil and chives using a highly-efficient vertical system that grows plants in rows of 20-foot tall columns rather than horizontally. This configuration is highly efficient as it allows water to trickle down the column, and enables nutrients to be gravity fed rather than pumped into the system. Plenty also uses cutting-edge LED lighting systems that emit less heat than traditional LEDs, along with microsensor technology and big data processing, that together can be used to produce high-quality produce at lower prices.

In July of this year, Plenty made news across the agtech industry when it announced that it had raised a record breaking $200 million Series B led by SoftBank Vision Fund – the $93 billion all-stage tech fund headed by Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son. Other participants in the round included affiliates of Louis M. Bacon, the founder of Moore Capital Management, and existing investors Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, Finistere, DCM, Data Collective, and Bezos Expeditions.

Due to the startup’s innovative technology, Plenty has the ability to grow up to 350 times more product compared to the same area of traditional farmland, while using only 1 percent of the water.

“The world is out of land in the places it’s most economical to grow these crops,” said Barnard. “After a decade of development driven by one of our founders, our technology is uniquely capable of growing hyper-organic food with no pesticides nor GMOs while cutting water consumption by 99 percent, making locally-grown produce possible anywhere.”

The capital gained through this Series B will be used by the company to fund the global expansion of its hyper-organic, hyper-yielding farm network, and to support its mission to answer the challenge of making fresh produce available and affordable in all locations through a predictable and perpetual system.

It is this expansion for Plenty where Kelty will be focusing, telling Bloomberg that his initial task with Plenty will be to establish a facility capable of mass production in the U.S.

Kelty’s move from Tesla into the agtech space is indicative of the growing traction agtech has been rapidly gaining in recent years, with not only investors, but farmers and consumers as well.

Arama Kukutai, managing director at Finistere Ventures recently shed light on how the agtech space is evolving to become “an important piece of the venture capital system” in Agtech Valuations – A New Paradigm? – a thought leadership piece published through GAI News discussing the release of the first Agtech Investment Review – a collaboration between Finistere and Pitchbook.

Kukutai explains how agtech is on pace to break records this year, with 111 deals valued at $1.16 billion closed to date, compared to 71 deals valued at $280 million closed in 2012. This year also has seen an average valuation of all financings of $1.27 billion (as of August) – surpassing the average of $1 billion for all of last year. Additionally, the report identifies more than 300 unique investors compared to 133 in 2012.

Within this dynamic operates Plenty – a startup that foresees a global ecosystem for its technology that entails 500 facilities and a $200 billion market, and which now has the expertise and weight of Kelty on its team.

-Lynda Kiernan