Feb 13, 2025

But was it actually? Events from the last couple years would suggest as much, with companies that had raised hundreds of millions ceasing operations , declaring insolvency and the like. Apart from Oishii , which grows strawberries, not a single vertical farming company raised north of $100 million in 2024. The highest funding figure for a leafy greens grower in that year was $59.5 million raised by Vertical Harvest. Fundraises are only one part of the story, though, and the low numbers don’t craft an entirely accurate picture of what vertical farming for leafy greens looks like in 2025. While it’s not likely we’ll see the mega-raises and sky-high valuations of yesteryear (which is no bad thing in some ways), a handful of players remain active and even innovative. “I do believe that there’s a place for vertical farming. It’s just we need to be very honest about what that is,” Agritecture CEO Henry Gordon Smith said during a recent conversation with AgFunderNews. “There are companies that have smallish farms, like neighborhood farms and if they get them running properly and profitable they could fit into some sort of urban future that has, say, fast casual restaurants and vertical farms together. There is a place for this at small scale.” Top vertical farming rounds 2024: Company Aerofarms declared bankruptcy in 2023, though it later emerged from that with a narrowed focus on its Virginia farm. Where are they now? During our conversation, Gordon Smith and I also pondered who was left in the space, particularly of those massively funded companies that were planning to build warehouse-sized farms around the world. Top rounds from 2024 suggest enabling technologies, equipment manufacturers and berries are where the industry is headed. To get a pulse on the leafy greens sector, AgFunderNews looked at vertical farming companies that had raised the most funding between 2019 and 2022 — the peak years for high valuations, mega-raises, and mega-claims. Like any other industry, some have thrived in the ensuing years and many more have flailed — though not necessarily disappeared altogether. Top rounds, 2019 – 2022 Some notable investors: Generate Capital, EIT Climate-KIC Status: GrowUp Farms snagged £38 million ($48 million) in 2024 to expand capacity at its Kent, UK vertical farm (dubbed Pepperness) built on a reclaimed parking lot. GrowUp is unique amongst leafy green growers in that its facilities are completely powered by renewable energy — now considered a top priority for vertical farming — from a co-located bioenergy plant. “Grow Up, because of their approach to energy and being co-located next to a biogas plant, means they not only benefit from renewable electricity but also renewable heat in a very efficient way,” Generate Capital managing director Eduardo Clemente told AgFunderNews last year . “This allows them to reduce the cost of the product, produce at scale and also sell at prices effectively competitive with traditional agriculture.” Inside a Soli Organic farm. Image credit: Soli Organic Some notable investors: Recharge Thematic Ventures, White Buffalo Capital Status: Upward Farms ceased all operations in 2023, including closing its Brooklyn facility and halting progress on its to-be-constructed farm in Pennsylvania. “We found that vertical farming is almost infinitely complex, as we tackled challenges, new ones emerged,” the three founders shared in a statement at the time of the closing. What growing inside an InFarm facility. Image credit: InFarm Have we learned anything? “Hype hits a wall in agriculture, because there are biological limits: like you literally can’t economically grow certain crops indoors,” says Gordon Smith. Not that that stopped companies from trying. A flurry of announcements starting around 2019 name-checked cocoa , watermelons , wheat , and blueberries , to name a few. Meanwhile, the bulk of companies making such announcements at the time had yet to turn a profit on even the humble leafy green. “Some of it is just practical,” Gordon Smith adds. After all, these are farms, so “focusing on farming is the absolute most important thing, rather than technology.” He cautions investors about companies that focus more on technologists than on farmers. While having one of the latter in the company isn’t a total failsafe (one of Plenty’s cofounders is a sixth-gen farmer), Gordon Smith flatly says, “don’t invest if there’s not a farmer onboard” in some part of the organization. Another message for investors: “Just because companies are throwing a bunch of capex at R&D doesn’t mean it’s needed. I think a lot of investors invested for that reason, and for the possibility of licensing that tech as a backup plan.” In other words, don’t innovate for innovation’s sake. This is already a widely preached message in indoor ag, particularly since the demise of many of the companies that were building out their tech from scratch. “There isn’t enough money in the world to make vertical farming work for vertical farming’s sake,” says Gordon Smith. “It has to be actually solving a really specific problem in a specific market. And there’s not enough money in the world to make it work if it isn’t solving a problem.”