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We built a company around this very problem- indoor farming (including vertical indoor farming) is …

We built a company around this very problem- indoor farming (including vertical indoor farming) is pretty complex and by default it's energy hungry. In theory, indoor farming is very efficient for commercial food production though. I thought why be the company that does all the plant biology, automation complexity magic for growers, and growers just do seedling and harvesting in a super basic mechanical setup. We are working with growers in EU, and they are all actually profitable growing normal veggies (lettuce, kale, etc.) as usual. But whenever we talked to some of the fancy VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies, they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves. Almost always, the leadership in these companies was the type that didn't know anything about plants, software, status quo of AI, etc.

Original discussionUpward Farms throws in towel ten years after founding vertical-farming business227 source comments · at import
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TO

This sounds like an interesting intro, but tell us more! What exactly do you offer / sell / solve? How are you different from “VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies”? It’s unclear from your message.

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MA

> they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves. I'd assume it's an attempt to have exclusivity (and thus a shot at exponential growth) instead of targeting slow and stable growth ? From your description alone, it feels your business model is more targeted to small business than startups (which is a good thing IMO)

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SH

Literally just got fired from a company that was just like that. Had a great idea, but wanted to build everything themselves vs just pieces of system that could differentiate us. Add onto that a weak business plan plus trying to compete with others in the greens space and it didn’t go very far. A lot of fun to work on though!

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