AgFunder Announces Motorleaf Raising Capital to Help Automate Indoor Farming

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Motorleaf, a technology company for indoor farmers, is launching a $750,000 financing campaign on AgFunder, the leading agriculture-focused online investment platform. Motorleaf has built a smart and automated indoor growing hardware and software platform for the controlled environment agriculture (CEA) sector.

Motorleaf, a Montreal, Canada based provider of indoor growing hardware and software, is launching a $750,000 convertible equity financing campaign on AgFunder, the leading agriculture-focused online investment platform. The company sells technology solutions for the growing process in the controlled environment agriculture (CEA) sector. Motorleaf has built a smart and automated indoor farming operating system, consisting of hardware devices and software analytics, to enable growers to capture data about their crops, learn what the crops need, and instruct existing equipment to answer those needs.

ag-funder-motorleaf

Indoor growing of plants has a unique set of challenges, as growers must control for all of the elements that impact a plant (lighting, temperature and humidity for example) 24/7, 365 days per year. One misstep in the growing process and a grower can kill an entire crop. Started by co-founders Alastair Monk and Ramen Dutta, motorleaf has designed and built 4 hardware units, each with a wireless mesh network enabled, that send grower’s data to their cloud based software. Dutta, CTO and Inventor of the motorleaf platform, has more than 15 years enterprise engineering experience with an Ag Engineering degree from McGill University and Monk, CEO, has more than 15 years of executive experience within high growth tech companies.

The company estimates the value of global hydroponic produce and U.S. legal cannabis at $17.7B and $5.7B, respectively, based on estimates from Manifest Mind, New Frontier and ArcView Group. In addition, IBISWorld estimates hydroponic growing equipment store revenue in the U.S. to be $654M alone, a subset of the company’s addressable market.

“The demands of Ramen’s IT business meant that he didn’t want to constantly go back and forth to his operation to test PH and nutrient levels, so he looked for an off-the-shelf solution that could turn his garden into a smart garden — like a Nest for agriculture — and he couldn’t find anything on the market,” says CEO and co-founder Alastair Monk. “So he started hacking together what we eventually called the HUB — for Huge Ugly Box — which was giant but started to offer the solutions he wanted.” The company has since reduced the size of this box significantly in an elegant and functional design.

Motorleaf has paying pre-sale customers including OEM manufacturers, supermarkets, high schools and licensed cannabis farmers. The product is currently being sold direct to individual growers and businesses as well as by OEM inside other grow systems under the motorleaf brand.

The company has received investment from FounderFuel (a program by Real Ventures), Canada’s premier accelerator program for technology startups. Motorleaf was one of six companies selected to participate in the Spring 2016 cohort of machine learning and big data startups.

For more details, view motorleaf’s investment profile (https://agfunder.com/listings/motorleaf) and a recording of their investor webinar (https://agfunder.com/webinar/motorleaf).

About motorleaf

motorleaf, based in Montreál, Canada, is a software and hardware company building technology solutions for the indoor farming industry. Currently, its operating system, coupled with a modular, scalable hardware platform, turns any indoor farm into a smart farm, without having to replace existing grow equipment. The motorleaf platform, which works for hobby growers up to large professional operations, captures grow data and learns what a crop needs, turning those insights into instructions for existing indoor grow equipment to automate the growing process. The solution includes a software platform and 4 modular hardware units.

About AgFunder

AgFunder is the world’s first online investment platform created specifically to connect accredited investors with world-class agriculture and agtech investment opportunities. Every company featured on AgFunder is evaluated for its economic and technical merits by our expert team of agriculture and business experts, providing potential investors access to some of the most promising agriculture investment opportunities. For more information visit https://agfunder.com.