Five US AgTech Startups to Watch 🌾

Agriculture today is fast becoming a practice of adopting cutting edge technology to replace old farming practices. AgTech/Agrotech or agriculture technology startups are companies with products, services, or applications that help improve agriculture input/output processes. As the industry increasingly faces production costs, labor shortages, etc., technology that scales fast is necessary. Here are 5 American agtech startups to watch. 

Credit: pch.vector

• Bowery Farming, headquartered in New York, is one of the largest vertical indoor farming companies in the US. It uses various technologies such as vision systems, automation, and machine learning to monitor its plants and their growth to be grown in warehouses in non-urban areas, that are then sold to urban restaurants and supermarkets such as Whole Foods. The company has attracted funding from GV and General Catalyst as well as celebrity chef angel investors. The company was founded in 2014.
• Aero Farms, is a competitor to Bowery Farming, offering data-driven indoor vertical farming through a patented aeroponic growing system. The B-corp certified company currently owns and operates four farming facilities in and around Newark, New Jersey, and also has a diverse portfolio of funding from VCs and angel investors. 
• RootAI is a research company developing AI and robotics to support indoor farming. This Woburn, Massachusetts-based company is developing a harvesting robot called Virgo for controlled greenhouse/glasshouse farm operations that are designed to learn and harvest tomatoes as a human would. Founded in 2018, it raised its first angel funding in 2020 from several VCs led by First Round Capital, spurred by the increased demand for its robotics as a result of COVID-19. 
• Ag Leader Technology is a hardware and software technology company providing services to the agriculture sector ranging from farm management, water management, harvesting, and more. The company is headquartered in Ames, Iowa, but serves a global market.
• GreenLight Biosciences is a Massachusetts-based privately-held biotechnology startup founded in 2000.  It specializes in making sustainable bio-pesticides that are highly targeted to specific pest varieties. They aim to address pain points for RNA supply in both agriculture and human health and pave ways to safe and environmentally friendly crop protection. The company is expected to go to market with its bio-pesticide in 2022 and has attracted two funding rounds in 2020 with its latter funding round over $100MM, led by Morningside Ventures.