UK agritech LettUs Grow raises €2.74 million to expand eco indoor farming technology

Bristol-based agritech LettUs Grow has secured €2.74 million in seed funding, to expand its ecologically minded farming technology and rocket into new markets. We included Lettus Grow in our list of Agtech disruptors to watch: 10 European startups innovating in agricultural technology, in August 2019.

LettUs Grow was founded in 2015 to tackle some of the greatest challenges facing the world today: CO2 emissions, waste, ecosystem collapse and food security. A new generation of indoor agriculture companies is addressing these problems by establishing localised indoor farms in and around cities, improving local food security and reducing food waste. However, many of these farms are having difficulty scaling to compete with traditional agriculture. That’s where Lettus Grow comes in.

Lettus Grow’s novel technology represents a step-change for indoor farms. They design modular, aeroponic irrigation and intelligent control technology to improve the efficiency, sustainability and ROI of indoor farming. Their systems are nozzle free, easy to clean, completely automatable and can be run without the need for pesticides. This patent-pending system dramatically reduces the operational cost of indoor agriculture, whilst delivering an average of a 70% increase in growth rate across a range of crop species compared to hydroponics.

LettUs Grow’s offering is centered around two core products: a novel aeroponic system and an integrated farm management software called Ostara. Ostara automates and controls the whole indoor farm, whilst collecting data on plants, overseeing inputs to crop growth and allowing farmers to trace crops from seed to sale, making operations more efficient.

This new investment round was led by Longwall Venture Partners LLP. The funds raised will allow Lettus Grow to build their second state-of-the-art aeroponic research centre, scale their existing technology, deliver on their growing sales pipeline and accelerate new product lines to market.

Charlie Guy, co-founder and Managing Director of LettUs Grow: “This investment gives us a platform to really accelerate in 2020 and scale-up the delivery of our game-changing technology to farmers across the country. We’re seeing rising demand from around the world for new technologies to help farmers grow crops in ways that mitigate against the effects of climate change and ever-increasing extreme weather events.”

Rebecca Todd, Investment Director at Longwall Ventures, an early stage technology investor: “Food security is an emerging major international challenge, especially in this era of unpredictable climate that we are now entering. We at Longwall are excited to be backing LettUs Grow in the development of game-changing technology that has the potential to make a real difference by making food growing more efficient, predictable, controllable and local.”

The round also included follow-on investment from the University of Bristol Enterprise Fund (managed by Parkwalk), Bethnal Green Ventures and ClearlySo, with legal representation from VWV LLP.