Aabesh De admits he's the last person you'd expect to launch a plant startup.
De has killed every plant imaginable, he explains, including his mother's prized Jasmine plant, which was handed down to him and had lived for years.
"After a week I ended up killing that plant," De said. "I have horticultural hopelessness to a T."
But his ineptitude for greenery is what inspired him to start Flora, a smart sensor and app that gives you more information about your plants and how to keep them alive.
The company started as a passion project for De at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, as he and many other Americans turned to houseplants during lockdown, but two months ago he left his job at Microsoft to jump into Flora full time.
The idea is simple: to create a hardware device that tells you exactly what your plant needs, from temperature, humidity, moisture and lighting conditions, and an app that gives you alerts and other information to stay on top of it all.
"I was looking for a tech solution that would tell me exactly what I needed to do," said De, who's now the owner of more than 60 houseplants. "There really wasn’t anything that was like a Fitbit for plants."
Flora's first batch of 1,000 sensors, which the startup makes from scratch, will arrive in March. Its iOS app is already live and lets you add your plants, determine optimal water and fertilizer schedules, and set your lighting conditions. The Flora app currently has 10,000 active users, De said.
Flora has raised $100,000 in pre-seed funding from some notable investors, including Reverb founder David Kalt, former Reverb COO Dan Melnick, and Mercedes Mane, the former CEO of PlantLink, a plant sensor company that was acquired by Scotts Miracle-Gro in 2016.
De previously worked as a sales engineer at Reverb and was part of Chicago Inno's 25 Under 25 in 2018.
The startup is planning some unique features for its plant-care platform, including a gamification element that rewards users for properly caring for their plants. It's also eyeing a B2B offering down the road to sell to farms and other professional indoor gardeners. Flora will retail for around $60, De said, and decrease in price the more you buy.
Plant ownership has become popular in recent years, particularly among millennials, who are filling their houses and apartments up with plans—fueled partly by social media, along with the self-care and wellness movements.
But De says our current love for plants is also a result of millennials taking longer to start a family, yet still wanting that sense of caretaking. So before you have a child, and even a pet, a plant is a good place to start.
"It's sort of an in-between step for taking care of something or someone," he said.
Flora isn't the only gardening startup growing in Chicago. Rise Gardens, an indoor gardening startup, has raised $13 million in funding from backers like Amazon's Alexa Fund. And LandscapeHub, a marketplace for nurseries and landscapers, has raised over $10 million.
