hexafarms, an operating system for commercial horticulture combining proprietary hardware with AI-powered crop intelligence software, has raised €4.8 million to advance its wireless crop sensing and automated pest and disease scouting, and accelerate commercial growth across DACH, Benelux and Spain. The funding round was led by Ananda Impact Ventures and Green Generation Fund, with participation from Grey Silo Ventures and better ventures, alongside existing backers Speedinvest, Mudcake and Techstars.
Alongside the seed round, hexafarms has also been awarded Rentenbank’s Startup Grant and a subordinated loan of up to €800,000. The German federal-government-backed programme supports a small number of early-stage agriculture-related businesses developing innovative technologies and services with high growth potential.
Commercial growers can leave as much as 30% of potential yield unrealised, according to hexafarms' own analysis, as growing conditions drift from the optimum, harvest forecasts prove unreliable, and pest and disease damage is only detected once it becomes visible. As growing operations expand and centralise against a backdrop of labour shortages and evolving disease pressures, manual scouting, spreadsheets and intuition are increasingly difficult to rely on at scale.
hexafarms has built a single operating system designed to give growers a continuous view of what is happening across their crops and what is likely to happen next. That intelligence lets growers act before yield is lost. It combines wireless crop sensing, yield forecasting and autonomous pest and disease detection, bringing together data and insights that growers have traditionally had to manage across separate systems.
The technology is already used by more than 50 growers across 13 countries, including SanLucar, one of Europe's largest fruit and vegetable companies, and grower cooperatives Elo and Royal ZON. This year, customers have already managed more than €300 million worth of produce using hexafarms’ operating system and hardware.
The operating system and hardware are available on a subscription basis, with hexafarms designing, deploying and maintaining the technology. This shifts the cost from capital expenditure to operating expenditure and reduces the need for growers to manage separate technology systems.
hexafarms’ wireless sensors capture data on climate, fertigation, substrate, drainage and light every five minutes. Yield forecasting generates rolling forecasts for each crop and production zone using more than 70 parameters. And autonomous robots scan every single plant every day, covering two to three hectares, detecting early signs of pests and disease. The operating system’s AI models currently cover around 50 cultivars across major greenhouse and soft-fruit crops, including tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, aubergines and a range of berries.
Because detection, sensing and forecasting data sit together within the operating system, growers can, for example, trace a pest event against the climate history of a particular production zone. The operating system is API-first and integrates with the climate computers growers already run, including Priva, Hoogendoorn and Ridder.
