Then, the bottom fell out because government subsidies fell away in certain jurisdictions. We saw this in solar and in the renewables industry when multiple venture capital funds invested in solar assets. “There is definitely a capital model in Silicon Valley and in venture capital world in general which is not focused on profitability but is focused on technological achievement and market penetration. While such financing has allowed the vertical farming industry to emerge, it may ultimately hinder the industry’s scalability and information sharing. Ideally, that robot would be plug and play and be able to work in greenhouses and vertical farms,” says Sonia.Īccording to Sonia, open data in the vertical farming industry may currently be restricted by the dominance of venture financing, which has its own return mandates to fulfill and sometimes wants a “winner takes it all” mentality for the ventures it chooses to back. The problem was the robot only works in their ecosystem, so you have to buy the whole farming solution in order for the one robot to work. For example, we saw an automation supplier with a great robot. But I don’t think autonomy will happen until we start sharing data.
Intelligence facilitates autonomy, and as we manage data flows, more farms can become autonomous. The question, then, is the organization of data into intelligence. “There are lots of data flows and increasingly inexpensive farm management systems. The company is also a strong advocate for open data in the vertical farming industry, which is currently lacking, as evidenced by the siloed development of multiple systems and products, some of which cannot be easily integrated into third-party systems. Our end goal is to be a grower’s resource and know more about growing at scale with different form factors than anyone else.” And with vertical farms, we are looking at a number of form factors. So, not just vertical farms, but also low-tech and high-tech greenhouses. “We believe that the most robust data comes from operating farms of multiple types. The company combines plant science, computer vision, machine learning, automation and artificial intelligence into its growing systems.Īccording to Sensei Ag CEO Sonia Lo, remaining form factor agnostic is key to the company’s mission of providing hyper-nutritious food to as large a consumer base as possible, which it achieves through both vertical farms and greenhouses.
Sensei Ag is a market-changing agtech company that develops agile growing solutions through a highly iterative approach to farming, focused on improving the nutritional quality of fruits and vegetables while also reducing production costs.
SENSEI AG SOFTWARE
In an emerging industry with companies eager to prove their technologies’ worth, Sensei Ag remains form-factor agnostic, meaning that the agtech company remains unbiased towards different farm hardware solutions – focusing more on software and plant biology.
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