Seeing an increasing need to meet global food demand in a sustainable way, Golden’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory today announced a new cohort of startups for one of its incubator programs.
NREL selected five new startups that focus on indoor agriculture to participate in its Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator, or IN2. The ninth IN2 cohort is specifically focused on developing technologies to help make indoor agriculture more sustainable.
“Indoor agriculture provides several environmental and operational benefits, but these processes typically produce more greenhouse gas emissions than field-grown systems,” Trish Cozart, IN2 program manager at NREL, said in a statement. “It’s critical to make indoor agriculture more sustainable, as land degradation and water shortages threaten the agriculture industry’s ability to feed a growing population. The companies in IN2’s ninth cohort are addressing this problem through innovative technologies.”
The selected companies will receive up to $250,000 in nondilutive capital from Wells Fargo and will conduct research and development at NREL and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri.
This incubator, which launched in 2014, has a total portfolio of 56 startups. Since joining the IN2 program, portfolio companies have raised $1.1 billion in external follow-on funding.
Prior to their selection, these five companies underwent review by Wells Fargo, NREL, IN2 and Donald Danforth Plant Science Center’s industry advisory board.
“This year, IN2 is focused on validating technologies that address key challenges in the indoor agriculture industry, including environmentally and financially sustainable ways to deliver light, control growth environments, evaluate environmental impacts and solve the need for crop varieties that are well-adapted for indoor environments,” Claire Kinlaw, director of Innovation Commercialization at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, said in a statement.
Meet the five companies, including two from Colorado, below, with through descriptions provided by NREL:
- Atlas Sensor Technologies – El Paso, Texas – IoT solutions for the water industry. Monitoring water hardness in real-time with its ion exchange fiber-based technology, to reduce cost and waste while improving how water softeners operate.
- GrowFlux – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania – Intelligent horticulture lighting. Delivering an IoT platform that is compatible with major manufacturers, which enables an average of 20 to 30 percent energy savings.
- Motorleaf – Montréal, Québec – Automated AI yield predictions. Specializing in the application of artificial intelligence for indoor agriculture to provide greenhouse growers and supply chain participants with information to optimize yield and reduce their carbon footprint.
- New West Genetics – Fort Collins, Colorado – Genomics-assisted breeding for the hemp industry. Creating proprietary, stable, high-yielding breed varieties for sustainable hemp production, delivering a highly productive crop that can support food, feed, biomass and specialty products for an expanding population.
- SunPath – Louisville, Colorado – Fiber optic indoor lighting. Improving lighting efficiency through its patented fiber optics technology, which saves energy and increases crop yield and quality to make indoor agriculture more economically viable and environmentally sustainable.
