David Ashton founded the robotic farming startup Canopii after being inspired by water-intensive agriculture in drought-stricken California. The Portland-based company builds fully autonomous, basketball-court-sized greenhouses that can grow up to 40,000 pounds of herbs and specialty greens annually with minimal water and power.
Canopii has developed its technology over five years with a small team, relying primarily on grants rather than venture capital to avoid the pitfalls that bankrupted other indoor farming companies. The company has reached a key automation milestone and now plans to deploy its first commercial farm in Portland, with a long-term strategy to franchise its units.
The main topics covered are the founding inspiration for Canopii, the description and capabilities of its robotic greenhouses, the company's cautious funding and development strategy, and its future commercial plans.
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 never-ending lettuce farms, acres of leafy green plants against a bleak, dry background. The fact that these lush, 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 Canopii, which looks to shrink produce supply chains.
Portland, Oregon-based Canopii builds robotic greenhouses that can autonomously run the whole crop-growing process from seeding to harvest without human intervention. These greenhouses can produce up to 40,000 pounds of produce a year while requiring only one spigot of water and taking up the same space as a basketball court.
The farms are manufactured by GK Designs and are currently designed to grow herbs and specialty greens like baby bok choy and gai lan, a Chinese broccoli.
Ashton told TechCrunch that he started really sowing the seeds for Canopii after the Portland-based agtech company he was set to work at filed for bankruptcy while he was driving up the coast to move there. He worked on the plans 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 that was successful, he applied for a $1 million-dollar grant to build a full-scale prototype.
“Now, five years later, we have hit a major milestone [for] the farm,” Ashton said. “We have an autonomous farm that grows everything from seed to harvest without any human intervention, and we did so with a very small team and very little capital, which I think is very different from what the rest of the industry had experienced.”
The company has raised approximately $3.6 million thus far, with $2.3 million largely from grants, and the rest from strategics.
Ashton is aware of what many investors and VCs think about the indoor farming category. The once hot sector saw companies like Bowery Farming and Plenty raise hundreds of millions of dollars before going bankrupt and before seeing strong success.
He argues their product is fundamentally different than vertical farms and that the company’s decision to move intentionally slow, and without venture capital, has allowed them to avoid many of the same hurdles.
“The capital stack has to be diversified beyond VC,” Ashtons aid. “We’re five now, and we’re still just iterating on one farm, which has allowed us to learn so much. I think if we got VC right away, and we try to scale after year one or two, that’s not possible with food infrastructure.”
The company has gotten inbound interest from schools, restaurants, casinos, and more. Now that the company has hit its automation milestone, it looks to build out its first commercial farm in downtown Portland. Down the line, Canopii plans to franchise these 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 achievement on this farm is that the whole thing runs off of 100 AMPs and 240 volts. That’s house power. You can literally put this in a backyard. And that speaks to the level of resource management that we’ve achieved in this farm.”
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