Currently you are in Berlin for three months. Who waters the plants at home?
David Ahmed: Our automation SaaS that is connected to the farm. Funny enough, just for fun, we built a smaller farm here in Berlin at Techstars as well and it's connected to the same system – and things just work. Which goes on to show the power of maturity of Industry 4.0 and software complexity. If something is terrible, like say for example, there's no fertilizer left, then we get a warning (in our Slack) and someone has to manually inspect. But other than that, everything is delivered when it's needed. We even sometimes totally forget but things have been pretty stable. Our farm is Saarbrücken is somewhat 700kms away from where we are based in Berlin, and yet things work as if it was in the other room. I'm myself amazed that it has been three months, and our technology is not even fully mature, and we had no reliability issues.
By the way, the pressure is on us. We are even on-boarding other customers. These are seasoned indoor farm growers who can see the power of technology and have already subscribed to our service. Seems like we will have to water plants across the EU, US, Middle East, all while being in Berlin while our servers remain in Frankfurt.
Being chosen by Techstars is a great success. To what extent do you benefit from the support? And can you already tell us what the future holds for Hexafarms in Saarland?
David Ahmed: The single best thing that happened to us. After multiple screening rounds, we were the final 13 teams out of 7500 startups that applied. Techstars was instrumental in forcing us to think really hard about how to become a category defining company and a unicorn case (i.e. market valuation over US$1 billion) in next few years. And we took the advice and focused rather on being the top AI and most robust software provider for the 100 Billion+ market of indoor food production. Being a part of Techstars eco system, we get access to the entire techstars network, which means we are a part of community of 7200 crazy great founders that have combined built 19 unicorns and reached a market cap of 71 billion dollars. Techstars works 1:1 from idea to Series A and beyond. And you are always surrounded by a group of people and mentors who are founders themselves or angel investors or VCs. Every week, we get the opportunity to share and sit in a small room with the likes of guests who built great startups that are impacting our lives daily like N26, Sendgrid, Arweave, Tier etc. There has been never a single startup related thing that we couldn't get some help from Techstars.
We want to remain a totally digital company. What is amazing with Saarland, for us, is the geographical location and with being in such a close proximity with institutions like CISPA and Uni Saarland, the availability of world class talent in the field of AI, Machine Learning, Security and Software development that we can really push the industry forward.
High energy costs are an absolute game changer for indoor farming right now. Is there a good reason to invest in vertical farming and especially your idea despite this? At what point do you come into play?
David Ahmed: Very good question – actually the energy crisis is hitting not just indoor farming, but general farming as well. Just this year, in Germany, the vegetable production shrank by some 13 or so percent. Saarland and Rhineland Palatinate have been constantly hit by extreme weather conditions for last few years. So indoor farming (be it vertical indoor farming or greenhouses) are not a fancy wish, but the only solution is to a bigger looming problem.
My vision is that indoor farms become the norm of food production – not grains, but vegetables, salads, herbs, mushrooms, etc. What is stopping that from happening is actually high energy cost. And that's precisely the challenge we are solving. We want to train our AI systems to understand plant biology so well (better than a human or group of humans ever can) that it can control the whole farm to take the least amount of resource to run the farm at peak efficiency. Think of it as our AI powered SaaS makes an indoor farm act like a very efficient 3d printer that takes the least amount of energy to produce the highest quality of produce. For instance, right now, indoor farms will use lights all the time or for specific duration, even if plants don't need. And it's even worse because it is energy wasted plus plants are feeling terrible. Our system, on the other hand, if it detects and learns in real time if plants don't need the light, it just turns the light off. I can tell tens of other ways in which the energy reduction is possible. A conservative estimate is that we can lower the cost of food production in indoor farms (and greenhouses) by 30 percent.
Cheeky answer: We come into play when an indoor farm or greenhouse has tried everything to reduce their production or operation costs! Right now, our technology is used to understand how fast the plants are growing and if they are healthy or if the conditions are right. But we are also already testing the approach that our SaaS becomes the operating system for entire food production. So it runs the farm operations like HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning), light etc. and at the same time is an assistant to the food growers as to what the next moves should be.
What have the algorithms learned recently, what insights have you been able to gather?
David Ahmed: Our algorithms can look at normal 2D image, and give a very good inference on the 3d size. They are able to measure the surface growth of Basil, Lettuce, and Kale with an accuracy of 97 percent. Now we are diving deeper into thermal imaging and even understanding photosynthetic activity as well, something which traditionally required physical lab setup and often killed the plant and was only accessible in lab settings.
My main insight: So called 'experts' in indoor farming know very little about plant biology and are really running their production at extremely low efficiency. I have seen greenhouses in Germany that are probably wasting thousands of Euros in heating alone when plants would actually be fine with slightly lower temperatures. But that's the problem. This is the conventional wisdom that has been passed down, and adding a bit of objective and sensors can really skyrocket the efficiency.
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