Thursday, July 20, 2017

Plenty Harvests $200M For Indoor Agriculture Technology

South San Francisco-based Plenty, a developer of large scale, indoor farming technology, has raised $200M in a Series B funding, the company said on Wednesday. The funding was led by the SoftBank Vision Fund, and also included affiliates of Louis M. Bacon, the founder of Moore Capital Management, LP, Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors, Bezos Expeditions, DCM, Data Collective and Finistere. As part of the funding, SoftBank's Jeffrey Housenbold joins the company's board. Plenty uses indoor farming technology, including LED lighting micro-sensors, and big data to grow produce on a large scale. The company says is is creating a way of growing "hyper-organic" food with no use of pesticides or GMOs while cutting water consumption by 99 percent.