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Farm Tech Startup Iron Ox Appoints Impossible Foods and Tesla Veteran Rachel Konrad as First Independent Board Member
Iron Ox growing facilities use advanced robotics to precisely cultivate perfect, nutritious produce by giving each plant the specific attention it needs, and then getting it on a store shelf nearby within about a day of harvest
-- Konrad, who spent the past five years at Impossible Foods, joins the board of Iron Ox during a period of rapid manufacturing scale-up and retail expansion.
-- Iron Ox growing facilities use advanced robotics to precisely cultivate perfect, nutritious produce by giving each plant the specific attention it needs, and then getting it on a store shelf nearby within about a day of harvest.
-- The Series B-stage company, whose products are already a breakout seller in California, is also hiring plant scientists, engineers, greenhouse operators, and roboticists.
SAN CARLOS, Calif., June 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Iron Ox, a farming innovation company with deep expertise in robotics and artificial intelligence, has appointed former Impossible Foods and Tesla executive Rachel Konrad as its first independent board member. This appointment further demonstrates the food tech startup's growth trajectory as they scale up operations and expand their commercial footprint.
Iron Ox, which launched the world's first autonomous farm, has an industry-leading intellectual property portfolio to automate farming and produce that's fresher, cleaner, and locally grown. Thanks to the company's groundbreaking robotics, Iron Ox farms require 90% less water than traditional farms — generating 30 times more produce per acre of land.
Konrad joins Iron Ox after spending the past five years as Chief Communications Officer and a member of the senior leadership team at Impossible Foods, reporting directly to CEO Pat Brown. She previously held senior management roles at Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi and Tesla, where she reported directly to Elon Musk as the company scaled up operations.
"We can't solve our planet's climate crisis without radical changes to the way we make food," said Konrad, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and enjoys cooking for her family and hiking with her rescue German Shepherd. "Iron Ox's intellectual property portfolio can usher in a new era of farming that produces food sustainably and ethically. But honestly, I was sold after my first whiff of Iron Ox basil."
"Rachel understands the unique power of disruptive startups to shift entire industries and force even the most entrenched incumbents to do the right thing for people and the planet," said Brandon Alexander, Iron Ox CEO and Co-Founder. "Her unique perspective will help Iron Ox refine and execute our ambitious strategy. As our first independent board member, we expect Rachel to help us set a new standard for inclusive governance in corporate America."
The Series B-stage company operates farms in Northern California and recently broke ground on a new 535,000 sq. ft. indoor farm in Lockhart, Texas. Today, California consumers can buy Iron Ox food throughout California at Whole Foods and at San Francisco Bay Area's upscale Biancchini's markets. Sales in Texas are expected to begin in late 2021.
The company is also hiring plant scientists, engineers, greenhouse operators and roboticists who are passionate about solving food insecurity, which is at the root of our environmental and public health crises.
For more information, and to view the job openings, visit the Iron Ox jobs page.
About Iron Ox:
Iron Ox is a farming innovation company with deep expertise in robotics and artificial intelligence, and a vision to solve global climate through food. Their approach redesigns every step of the farming process, achieving levels of precision that are impossible through traditional farming. Iron Ox produce is both local and sustainable by design, greatly reducing systemic food waste and minimizing the ecological impact of farming. For more information, visit www.ironox.com.
SOURCE: Iron Ox
AppHarvest Acquires Agricultural Robotics And Artificial Intelligence Company Root AI To Increase Efficiency
Acquisition of Root AI and its signature robot, Virgo, bolsters the company’s intelligent tools to produce foods sustainably. Root AI CEO Joins AppHarvest as Chief Technology Officer
Acquisition of Root AI and its signature robot, Virgo, bolsters the company’s intelligent tools to produce foods sustainably. Root AI CEO Joins AppHarvest as Chief Technology Officer
MOREHEAD, Ky., April 08, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AppHarvest, Inc. (NASDAQ: APPH, APPHW), a leading AgTech company and Certified B Corp focused on farming more sustainably using 90 percent less water than open-field agriculture and only recycled rainwater, announced today that it has acquired Root AI, an artificial intelligence farming startup that creates intelligent robots to help manage high-tech indoor farms. The acquisition of Root AI and its robotic universal harvester, Virgo, is expected to provide AppHarvest with a baseline of harvesting support working alongside crop care specialists focused on more complex tasks. AppHarvest expects the game-changing advantage of the technology to be in the data the robots can collect as they harvest, which can help evaluate crop health, precisely predict yield and optimize overall operations of the controlled environment agriculture (CEA) facility.
“Farming as we’ve known it is broken because of the increasing number of variables such as extreme weather, droughts, fire, and contamination by animals that make our food system unreliable. Indoor farming solves for many of those challenges, and the data gathered can exponentially deliver more insights that help us predict and control crop quality and yield,” said AppHarvest Founder & CEO Jonathan Webb. “One of the key challenges in agriculture is accurately predicting yield. Many downstream decisions from work scheduling to transportation to retail planning are based on that. Any deviation between projection and actual yield can result in fire drills for numerous functions to adjust for the change, and AI can help solve for that.”
Root AI co-founder and CEO Josh Lessing will take on the role of Chief Technology Officer for AppHarvest where he will take the lead in continuing to develop the robots and their AI capabilities for the network of indoor farms that AppHarvest is building. Lessing, along with co-founder Ryan Knopf who will join AppHarvest as vice president of technology, helped establish Root AI as an early leader in employing artificial intelligence in CEA. Virgo is the world’s first universal harvester, which can be configured to identify and harvest multiple crops of varying sizes including tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and more delicate fruits such as strawberries among others.
Though Virgo can work indoors or out, the robot’s focus has been on controlled environment agriculture. Over the past three years, it has collected the world’s largest data set of tomato images to enable it to identify more than 50 varieties in multiple growing environments and at varying stages of maturity to learn how and when to harvest.
Virgo uses a set of cameras combined with an infrared laser to generate a 3D color scan of an area to determine the work it can perform. Once it maps the tomatoes, it assesses their orientation and determines if they are ripe enough to pick. The robot can be programmed to make other quality assessments as well. The scan enables the robot to find the least obstructive and fastest route to pick the crop ahead of the arrival of the robotic arm and gripper. The robot can identify hundreds of tomatoes in a fraction of a second without having to connect to the cloud. Virgo keeps score on its success rate like a video game. A built-in feedback mechanism constantly evaluates its efficiency so it learns how to harvest any given configuration of fruit most effectively.
“A piece of food—whether that’s a tomato or a berry or a cucumber—is an outcome from many variables that are part of the growing process. Enhanced data collection for each plant through the robot can lead to insights that teach us precisely how to design better, more resilient food systems that are reliable and that produce more food with fewer resources,“ said Lessing. “Joining forces with AppHarvest is a natural fit: we want to ensure a stable, safe supply of the nutritious and healthy food that people should be eating -- grown sustainably -- and doing that at the scale of AppHarvest gives us the opportunity to make the greatest difference.”
Gathering more data through AI enables growers to use real-time information to improve a number of sustainability efforts such as detecting and eliminating pests naturally, helping indoor farms successfully grow chemical pesticide-free fruits and vegetables.
AppHarvest is investing approximately $60 million, consisting of approximately $10 million in cash and the balance in AppHarvest common shares, to acquire Root AI. The Company will issue approximately 2,328,000 shares for the transaction.
Founded in 2018, Root AI is based in Somerville, Mass., and has 19 full-time employees, all of whom are expected to join AppHarvest’s technology group to help advance the mission of building a resilient and sustainable food supply.
About AppHarvest
AppHarvest is an applied technology company building some of the world’s largest high-tech indoor farms in Appalachia that grow non-GMO, chemical pesticide-free produce using 90 percent less water than open-field agriculture and only recycled rainwater while producing yields up to 30 times that of traditional agriculture on the same amount of land with zero agricultural runoff. The Company combines conventional agricultural techniques with cutting-edge technology and is addressing key issues including improving access for all to nutritious food, farming more sustainably, building a domestic food supply, and increasing investment in Appalachia. The Company’s 60-acre Morehead, Ky. facility is among the largest indoor farms in the U.S.
For more information, visit https://www.appharvest.com/.
VIDEO: How 2 Hong Kong Pioneers’ Hi-Tech Robotic Arms Can Transform Traditional Industries And Research
Technology created at Jonathan Cheung’s Inovo Robotics performs repetitive tasks that can cultivate sustainable crops and process foods in automated kitchens
Technology created at Jonathan Cheung’s Inovo Robotics performs repetitive tasks that can cultivate sustainable crops and process foods in automated kitchens
Eric Wong has transformed lab experiments with Nikyang’s automated tools that allow researchers to carry out a more reliable and systematic analysis
7 January 2021
While robotic technology has been widely used by big manufacturing companies to increase productivity, the high cost of getting started means many smaller businesses have yet to take advantage of its huge potential.
However, Inovo Robotics, a Hong Kong-based technology start-up, is working to solve this problem.
Since it was founded in 2016, the robotics company has been developing solutions for small- and medium-sized enterprises to help them adapt to automation in their everyday business practices.
Jonathan Cheung, the co-founder of the start-up, says his goal is to “democratize robots” and develop tools for all businesses to help them improve efficiency and remain competitive.
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“We found that there is such a big disconnect to the market for small businesses to be able to benefit from affordable and flexible robots,” he says.
“There are a lot of businesses that are struggling to get staff to do monotonous tasks, so what we’re developing is really a tool that enables them to take away repetitive work.”
Jonathan Cheung, the co-founder of Inovo Robotics, says high entry costs mean that many small businesses have yet to take full advantage of automation’s full potential.
Disrupting traditional industries
One of the applications of the robotic arms has seen them used around the clock to carry out repetitive tasks that help grow high-quality, pollution-free vegetables at a futuristic farm in Hong Kong’s Tai Po district.
The farm, operated by indoor farming company Farm66 since 2018, is located inside a 20,000-square-foot (1,860-square-metre) factory building.
The use of the robotic arms to automatically sow seeds and harvest plants helps the farm to produce up to 200 tonnes of organic fresh produce, including cherry tomatoes, cabbage and basil, which is sold online and delivered to the city’s supermarkets and restaurants.
“Robots really improve the efficiency and speed of the products that are being made,” Cheung says. “In this competitive world, there is always a desire to drive costs down.”
In the case of vertical farming, the technology means minimal space and manpower are needed for the farming process, offering a glimpse of how technology will be able to transform farming in future.
Besides the vertical farm, the technology has also been used in an automated kitchen, where it helps with food processing to ensure cooking consistency. Inovo Robotics is also teaming up with a programming company to develop a system for high-resolution 3D scanning.
Inovo Robotics’ technology is being used to cultivate fresh organic produce at Farm66’s futuristic indoor farm inside an industrial factory building in Hong Kong. Photo: Farm66
Popularising robots for everyday use
Before setting up his own venture, Cheung spent more than a decade working as an engineer, when he witnessed first-hand how robots can help businesses scale their operations.
In 2016, Cheung and a colleague co-founded Inovo Robotics to popularise the everyday use of robot technology by businesses.
Its launch product, Modular Arm, with an adjustable system of six fully rotatable joints, gives the robot the flexibility to reach different positions. The robot’s modularity also gives customers an easy mechanism to choose longer or shorter arms, depending on their configurations.
Cheung says while large manufacturing companies often require tools that can automate a repetitive task, smaller businesses look for collaborative robots that can work alongside staff to complete different jobs at the same time.
“Smaller businesses tend to have smaller batch sizes and tighter spaces,” he says. “That is where a collaborative robot really comes into its own.”
Jonathan Cheung says Inovo Robotics’ modular robot technology offers small businesses a variety of options thanks to its adjustable flexible joints and the choice of using shorter or longer arms.
Inovo Robotics currently has two offices at Hong Kong Science Park, a government-run start-up incubator, and London, in the United Kingdom, as it seeks to tap into both the Asia-Pacific and European markets.
Cheung says Hong Kong has proved an ideal location to scale up his business because of its proximity to hi-tech research and an abundance of talent.
“[We can] be close to our supply chain, which allows us to manage it closely and deliver the best product to our customers,” he says.
“At any point in Hong Kong, you are probably within 25km to five or 10 great universities,” he adds. “There is a wealth of talent to be able to tap into – there are only a few countries with that level of accessibility.”
Revolutionizing academic research
Another Hong Kong start-up, Nikyang, has also developed fully automated laboratory equipment to help academic researchers increase the reliability of data collected in experiments.
Today, its automation technology has been applied in many settings, such as research institutes and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
The venture was founded by Hongkonger Eric Wong in 1999 with the initial goal of helping researchers in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) to conduct analysis in a more systematic way.
“The basic dream of Nikyang was originally to pursue TCM research to gain a better understanding,” says Wong, who graduated with a master’s degree in biochemistry in Canada.
“I thought we needed a more standardized way of doing analysis in TCM to collect valid and precise information.”
Eric Wong, the founder of automation company Nikyang, says the use of robotic technology allows researchers to conduct more systematic analysis.
When he started his business journey by reaching out to laboratories in Hong Kong and mainland China, he realized that researchers wanted to use machines to help them follow the correct procedure as closely as possible while carrying out repetitive work.
However, many automated instruments available then lacked the ability to carry out different steps in lab research, he says, rendering them error-prone when applied in studies.
To solve the problem, Wong collaborated with Chemspeed, a Switzerland-based provider of lab equipment, in developing specific instruments for TCM research.
His team has integrated Chemspeed’s tools with robotic arms and wearables to increase collaboration between researchers and machines in conducting the analysis.
However, he realized the company would not be sustainable if it focused solely on serving the TCM industry, so he later diversified the business and began developing solutions for different settings.
In 2008, Nikyang began receiving orders from petrochemical companies in China, which gave Wong a lifeline to sustain his business and pursue his dream in TCM research.
The venture now places an emphasis on boosting effectiveness by providing an immerse lab experience.
Its SmartLab product, which is still under development, is set to integrate sensor technology, smart wearables, and cloud data management to help researchers work more efficiently with machines.
Nikyang’s SmartLab, which is still under development, will integrate sensor technology, smart wearables, and cloud data management so researchers can work more efficiently with machines. Photo: Nikyang
Nikyang has its headquarters at Hong Kong Science Park, where it carries out most of its research and development work. To tap into the China market, it has also opened branches in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou to sell its products.
Wong says Hong Kong has served as an ideal location to grow his company because of its connectivity with China and different parts of the world.
“Hong Kong is definitely unique in terms of being a super-connector between the East and the West,” he says.
The city’s world-class financial market and sound legal system have also helped start-ups in raising capital and developing ideas as they embark on their journey.
Pioneering spirit
Both Wong and Cheung believe it is important for aspiring innovators to be passionate about their business vision to help them overcome challenges when developing and selling the products.
Wong, who spent a decade before he found a way to make his business sustainable, says it was vital to remain dedicated because many innovators experience failures before they can get their businesses on track.
“You need to have passion and a big heart to accept failure, and [an] even bigger heart to think and take risks,” he says.
Eric Wong, who spent a decade before finding a way to make Nikyang sustainable, says aspiring innovators should be passionate about their business vision – and not focus only on profits.
Wong also advises young entrepreneurs not to look only at making profits if they want to make a difference in the world.
“Money is only a by-product,” he says, adding that many successful pioneers often have to make substantial investments before they are able to disrupt the industry.
Cheung agrees that innovators must feel empowered to turn ideas into reality.
“My advice is to really focus on the business model,” he says. “It’s a very, very difficult journey to go on, and it’s very, very rewarding as well. And it’s very important to make sure you stay true to what you believe in.
“Having an idea that you believe in wholeheartedly, that you are willing to give your time and commitment to, is a good validation that you are on the right track.”
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USA (CA) - Iron Ox Raises $20 Million To Grow Robotic Greenhouse Operations
The funding will be used to open additional robotic growing facilities in California and other parts of the U.S., according to company co-founder and CEO Brandon Alexander
Khari Johnson @kharijohnson
September 9, 2020
Robotics farming company Iron Ox today announced the close of a $20 million funding round. The funding will be used to open additional robotic growing facilities in California and other parts of the U.S., according to company co-founder and CEO Brandon Alexander. The funding will also be used to hire additional machine learning and robotics experts as well as growers and scientists who work with plants.
“We’re now competing on price with field farms, but we think we can do even better and take this to more people,” he said.
Iron Ox employs a 1,000-pound mobile transport system roughly the size of a car to move trays of growing vegetables and tend to plants using a robotic grasper while computer vision systems monitor the plant growth cycle. The semi-autonomous system still relies on humans for a part of its seeding, pruning, and inspection process, Alexander said, but the goal is for Iron Ox to someday be fully autonomous.
While startups like Bowery practice indoor vertical farming in urban facilities near New York and Baltimore, Iron Ox has turned its focus toward greenhouse farming since the company was founded in 2015 as a way to lower energy costs. Earlier this year, Iron Ox opened its first greenhouse, a 10,000-square foot facility in Gilroy, California, the company’s second location. Iron Ox currently provides produce to 15 Whole Foods stores in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Though Gilroy is known as the garlic capital of the world, Iron Ox does not currently grow any garlic. Instead, the company focuses on leafy green vegetables like lettuce and some herbs.
Alexander said Iron Ox’s biggest challenge is how to use data collected by sensors to train AI systems that produce higher yields at lower costs.
“I would say in agriculture as a whole it’s not just collecting data, it’s not just taking an image, but it’s actually how do you include that data into the decision making process?” Alexander said. “I would say that is the biggest challenge in ag is how do you respond to these each individual plants and the variety and all these little variables.”
The $20 million funding round was led by Pathbreak Ventures with participation from Crosslink Capital, Amplify Partners, Eniac Ventures, R7 Partners, Tuesday Ventures, and At One Ventures. Iron Ox is based in San Carlos, California. The company currently has 30 employees and has raised $45 million to date.
Field farming today is still the most efficient way to grow produce. However, concern about shrinking field yields and instability due to climate change has spurred interest in indoor farming. In 2018, international teams from companies like Microsoft and Tencent competed against each other to find out who could grow the highest yield of cucumbers inside a greenhouse using AI and automation. (Spoiler: The Microsoft team won.)
In other AI and agriculture news, last month the startup iFarm raised $4 million for its AI-driven urban farming solution, and in June the startup Burro began rolling out its autonomous farm robot in southern California to assist in grape harvesting.
Image credits: Iron Ox