Arctic Farming – IoT
What it is:
Arctic Farming offers vertical farming technology that was designed to help solve global food issues by making indoor farming mainstream. Their automated vertical farming solutions offer easily scalable vertical farming technologies that can be used by wholesale, restaurant, and retail industries, as well as by urban farmers. This is how the company describes the process:
- Vertical surface design: plants are grown horizontally with roots insulated in a separate growth chamber. This vertical surface design is cheaper to operate and more efficient than stacked vertical systems.
- Aeroponic farming: a nutrient-rich water solution is pumped up the wall, aerosolized, and misted directly into the plant root zone. This specialized type of vertical farming is called aeroponics.
- Closed-loop irrigation: all excess water is circulated back into the nutrient chamber. This allows for up to 95% water savings compared to conventional farming.
- A diverse sensor suite: a range of embedded sensors measure growth-relevant variables around and inside the modules.
- Smart technologies: smart technologies inside the wall analyze the data and react to changes automatically, optimizing plant growth.
- Full automation: after plugging in the plants, automation takes over, alerting when plants are ready for harvest.
- Data tracking: All data is tracked and processed in real-time with crucial information displayed in a SaaS-based farming platform.
- Computer vision and machine learning: used to learn more about plant growth in each growing environment.
- Error detection: malfunctions are automatically detected and sent to the mobile app as well as to the Arctic Farming maintenance team.
Who Made It?
Arctic Farming was founded in 2019 by current CEO Oliver Rotco and is based in Espoo, Finland. Rotco is a Helsinki-based serial entrepreneur working on sustainable technologies.
Funding status:
The company raised $4.7M through a combination of Seed, Seed-1 and Seed-2 funding in a deal led by Unilever Ventures on July 19, 2022, putting the company’s pre-money valuation at $17M. Willow Growth Partners, Raissa Gerona, Courtney Reum, Whitney Port, Rocky Barnes, and 8 more investors also participated in the round.
Why we like it:
- Offers fully automated, IoT based vertical farming technology
- Helps address water waste from conventional farming techniques, and reduces transportation climate impacts by growing food closer to the end consumer
- Vertical farming modules can be installed as individual systems into any restaurant or professional kitchen, or as highly scalable industrial farm
Did you know?
According to Arctic Farming, indoor vertical farming allows us to produce fresh vegetables and berries right next to the consumers, cutting food waste while saving up to 95% of the water used in conventional farming.