David Ahmed (Left) & Felix Kirchstein (Right)
Berlin-based hexafarms, which combines its own sensors and robots with AI software to monitor commercial crops, has raised €4.8 million in seed funding. The round was led by Ananda Impact Ventures and Green Generation Fund, with Grey Silo Ventures and better ventures joining existing backers Speedinvest, Mudcake and Techstars.
The company has also won a startup grant and a subordinated loan of up to €800,000 from Rentenbank, the German government-backed agricultural development bank.
The money will go into hexafarms’ wireless crop sensing and automated pest and disease scouting, and into expanding sales across the DACH region (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), the Benelux and Spain.
One system for sensing, forecasting and scouting
hexafarms brings three jobs that growers usually manage separately into a single system:
- Sensing: wireless sensors record climate, fertigation, substrate, drainage and light every five minutes.
- Yield forecasting: rolling forecasts for each crop and production zone, based on more than 70 parameters.
- Pest and disease detection: robots scan every plant every day across two to three hectares, looking for early signs of trouble.
Because all the data sits in one place, a grower can, for example, trace a pest outbreak back through the climate history of the zone where it started. The system works alongside the Priva, Hoogendoorn and Ridder climate computers that many growers already use, and its AI models cover around 50 varieties of greenhouse and soft fruit crops, including tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, aubergines and berries.
Growers pay by subscription, and hexafarms installs, owns and maintains the hardware, turning a large up-front investment into a running cost.
Already working at scale
More than 50 growers in 13 countries use the system, including SanLucar, one of Europe’s largest fruit and vegetable companies, and grower cooperatives Elo and Royal ZON. hexafarms says its customers have managed more than €300 million worth of produce with it this year.
The company argues the need is large: by its own analysis, commercial growers can leave as much as 30% of potential yield unrealised because growing conditions drift, forecasts miss, and pests and disease are spotted only once the damage is visible.
Chief executive and co-founder David Ahmed said: “The opportunity is not simply to automate more tasks, but to give growers the intelligence to act on what’s happening in the crop before it costs them yield.”
Why early detection matters
The case for earlier detection has been clear this year. UK lettuce growers saw aphid populations surge twice during the season, with some fields abandoned altogether. Yet adopting new technology remains hard: in a survey of farmers in Tesco’s supply chain, 76% reported significant barriers to taking up new technology. Subscription models like hexafarms’ are one way of lowering that barrier, because growers don’t have to buy the equipment outright.
The UK isn’t among hexafarms’ target markets for this expansion. The Fresh Edit has asked the company about its plans for UK growers.
For more information about hexafarms, please visit: https://hexafarms.com/
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