Fruitful receives half a million in pre-seed round

With agricultural land becoming more scarce, greenhouses and vertical farms have become popular to supply the growing population. Crop production needs are expected to increase by 70 percent to sustainably meet the demand of a population of 10bn by 2050. However, to operate economically and ecologically sustainable, farmers need to be mindful of how they use their resources since slight variations in a growth environment can affect the outcome. Reducing operational expenses while maintaining or increasing the crop-produce quality has remained a significant challenge. External factors like soaring energy prices further complicate the issues.

Founded in 2021 by Thomas Kleiven, Giulia Schneider, Mihai Grigore and Patrick Albrecht, Fruitful is stepping in to tackle these challenges. The company’s software is an AI-based decision-making tool for greenhouses and vertical farms. The platform uses computer vision to capture the plant biorhythm and connects it with data points from the growth environment. Fruitful’s models simplify the indoor farming process by shortening the learning cycles and recommending appropriate actions to save resources and time or improve crop quality.

The Fruitful technology comprises two offerings: the Fruitful Monitor provides a cloud-based growth monitoring system that eases production efforts and lets clients scale up without additional labour capabilities. The second offer is the Fruitful Optimizer, which allows clients receive active intelligence and dynamic growth recipes based on live analytics (recommender engine). With it, clients can leverage Fruitful AI and best practices from our entire network of farms.

Using the funds from its pre-seed round, Fruitful will accelerate the development and distribution of its solution. The company has already built a network of clients that support it in exploring plants quicker than isolated in-house analytics teams and applying best practices across the entire network.

(Press release/RAN)