David Ashton grew up outside of Sacramento, California and went to college in San Luis Obispo during the historic drought of the late 2000s.
He spent years driving the 300-mile stretch between Sacramento and San Luis Obispo, enthralled by the endless lettuce farms, acres of leafy plants against a bleak, dry backdrop. The fact that these rich, green crops were grown in drought conditions to be shipped to other parts of the country stuck with Ashton and later became the inspiration for his robotic farming startup Canopiiwhich appears to be shrinking manufacturing supply chains.
Portland, Oregon-based Canopii builds robotic greenhouses that can autonomously perform the entire growing process from seed to harvest without human intervention. These greenhouses can produce up to 40,000 pounds of produce per year while requiring only one spigot of water and taking up the same amount of space as a basketball court.
The farms are made by GK Designs and are currently designed to grow herbs and specialty greens such as baby bok choy and gai lan, a Chinese broccoli.
Ashton told TechCrunch that he actually started planting the seeds for Canopii after the Portland-based agtech company he was going to work for filed for bankruptcy while he was driving to the coast to relocate there. He worked on the designs at night while his wife was in medical school.
After three years, he applied for a $250,000 grant with the National Science Foundation to build a prototype of his vision. After being successful, he applied for a $1 million grant to build a full-scale prototype.
“Now, five years later, we have reached an important milestone [for] the farm,” Ashton said. “We have a stand-alone farm that grows everything from seed to harvest without human intervention, and we’ve done it with a very small team and very little capital, which I think is very different from what the rest of the industry has experienced.”
The company has raised about $3.6 million so far, with $2.3 million mostly from grants and the rest from strategies.
Ashton knows what many investors and VCs think about the indoor growing category. The once-hot sector saw companies like Bowery Farming and Plenty raise hundreds of millions of dollars before going bankrupt and seeing major success.
He argues that their product is fundamentally different from vertical farms, and that the company’s decision to move deliberately slowly and without venture capital has allowed them to avoid many of the same obstacles.
“The capital stack needs to diversify beyond VC,” Ashton said. “There are five of us now and we’re just continuing to iterate on a farm, which has allowed us to learn so much. I think if we get VC right away and try to scale after a year or two, that’s not possible with food infrastructure.”
The company has received inbound interest from schools, restaurants, casinos and more. Now that the company has achieved the automation milestone, it looks to build its first commercial farm in downtown Portland. Canopii then plans to franchise those farms in the future — and yes, raise venture capital, once it’s ready.
“We can mass produce it like a car,” Ashton said. “I think a big accomplishment on this farm is that the whole thing runs off 100 AMP and 240 volts. That’s home power. You can literally put it in a yard. And that speaks to the level of resource management we’ve achieved on this farm.”
