Bowery Farming Receives VC boost From Google, Others

Jun 14, 2017, 1:31pm EDT Updated Jun 14, 2017, 3:17pm EDT

Anthony Noto  |  ReporterNew York Business Journal

In Feb. 2017, Bowery raised… more

COURTESY OF BOWERY

Irving Fain, CEO and… more

Bowery Farming Inc., the company known for growing the world’s first post-organic produce indoors, raised $20 million in new funding from General Catalyst and GGV Capital.

GV, or Google Ventures (NASDAQ: GOOG), also participated in the effort.

Bowery Farms is the innovator behind the scalable indoor vegetation system that can be… more

Prior to this round, Bowery Farming raised $7.5 million.

Previous investors include First Round Capital, Box Group, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, SV Angel, Homebrew, Flybridge, Red Swan, RRE, and Urban.us. Blue Apron founder and CEO Matt Salzberg, Plated chair Sally Robling, Gramercy Tavern co-founder Tom Colicchio and DigInn CEO Adam Eskin were also involved as angel investors.

To learn more about the new funding round and the current state of Bowery's produce business, we reached out to 37-year-old co-founder and CEO Irving Fain.

Here's what the Manhattan-based entrepreneur had to say:

How has the company expanded over the past couple years?

We raised our seed round in 2015. In a little over two years, we’ve assembled an incredible team of experts passionate about the problem we’re solving, developed BoweryOS — our proprietary software platform — from the ground up, and built a fully operational farm eight miles outside of New York City that supplies restaurants and grocery stores throughout the region. We are proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish so far, but there’s a lot more we want to accomplish.

Why is this funding round for Bowery Farming important?

This round will allow us to expand our operations, continue to innovate and invest in our proprietary technology, and hire world-class employees across the organization. We’re in the process of expanding our partnership with Whole Foods (NASDAQ: WFM) to serve more locations throughout the Tri-state area, and have already begun work on our next farm, which will allow us to deliver the freshest, purest produce to more people in urban areas.

We’re also actively hiring across the organization from engineering to agricultural science and business operations. It’s a great time to join our team!

Where can Bowery's produce be purchased?

Our produce is currently available at select Whole Foods and Foragers stores in the Tri-state area, and featured on the menus of Tom Colicchio’s New York restaurants Craft and Fowler & Wells. We’ve been getting great feedback from customers to-date, and are looking forward to expanding to serve more people in the Tri-state area in the near future.

What are some of the challenges that Bowery faces as a growing company?

There’s a clear need to improve traditional agriculture,which sits at the epicenter of so many global issues today. While indoor farming is still fairly new, we believe in the category and love that it is growing and helping to produce food in a way that’s better for us and our environment. This means we all win, and we’re excited to be the first to offer post-organic produce and to use BoweryOS — our proprietary operating system — to completely control our products from seed to store.

We also wholeheartedly believe in locally sourced food, and consider ourselves a local producer helping to meet an already high consumer demand for quality, local produce.

What are some of the high-tech approaches that Bowery takes?

By combining the benefits of the best local farms with advances made possible by technology, our indoor farms create the ideal conditions to grow the purest produce imaginable. We designed BoweryOS specifically to apply machine learning to vast amounts of data from advanced vision systems and an extensive network of sensors throughout our farm. This provides complete visibility into all the variables that drive growth at every stage in a plant's lifecycle, allows us to continuously monitor health and quality, and enables us to provide each plant with exactly what it needs and nothing more. It also drastically reduces the risk of human error and waste in the growing and harvesting processes. This precision is part of what allows us to be 100+ times more productive on the same footprint of land and use 95 percent less water than traditional agriculture.