Canopii is looking to succeed where previous indoor farms have not

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 miles between Sacramento and San Luis Obispo, mesmerized by the never-ending lettuce farms, acres of lush green plants against a bleak, dry backdrop. 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 an inspiration for robotic farming startup Canopii, which is looking to shrink produce supply chains.

Canopii, based in Portland, Oregon, is building robotic greenhouses that can autonomously run the entire crop-growing process from seeding to harvest without human intervention. These greenhouses can produce up to 40,000 pounds of produce per year while requiring only one tap of water and taking up the same space as a basketball court.

The planters were manufactured by GK Designs and are currently designed to grow specialty herbs and vegetables 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 set to work for 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.

Three years later, he applied for a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to build a prototype of his vision. After that was successful, he applied for a $1 million grant to build a full-scale prototype.

“Now, five years later, we have reached a major milestone [for] “The farm. We have an independent farm that grows everything from seed to harvest without any 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 seen,” Ashton said.

The company has raised approximately $3.6 million to date, of which $2.3 million is mostly from grants, and the rest from strategies.

Ashton understands what many investors and venture capitalists think about the indoor farming category. The once-hot sector has seen companies like Bowery Farming and Plenty raise hundreds of millions of dollars before going bankrupt and before achieving solid success.

He says their product is fundamentally different from vertical farms, and that the company’s decision to move deliberately slowly, and without investment capital, has allowed them to avoid many of the same hurdles.

“Capital needs to be diversified beyond venture capital,” says Ashton. “There are five of us now, and we are still iterating on one farm, which has allowed us to learn a lot. I think if we got venture capital right away, and tried to expand after a year or two, this would not have been possible with the food infrastructure.”

The company has received internal interest from schools, restaurants, casinos and more. Now that the company has achieved a breakthrough in automation, it is looking to build its first commercial farm in downtown Portland. In the future, Canopii plans to franchise these farms in the future – and yes, raise investment capital, once they are ready.

“We can mass-produce it like a car,” Ashton said. “I think the big breakthrough on this farm is that everything runs on 100 amps and 240 volts. That’s home power. You can literally put it in the backyard. That speaks to the level of resource management we’ve achieved on this farm.”