iUNU announced that it has raised $7 million in an oversubscribed Series A financing led by S2G Ventures and Ceres Partners to help in transforming the way indoor growers do business by harnessing the power of computer vision through its product offering, LUNA.
“The LUNA system continues to attract greenhouse growers as a leading comprehensive greenhouse management platform,” said Cristina Rohr, principal at S2G Ventures. “We are delighted to partner with iUNU to support the company’s continued growth and long-term plans to make indoor growing operations more profitable and efficient.”
The LUNA platform delivers a system of mobile and fixed cameras with high definition imaging and environmental sensors that measure and record everything down to the real-time growth rate of each plant. The software combines computer vision and machine learning technologies to continuously build detailed models of individual plants, unique among millions, throughout the day.
LUNA detects even the most minute changes in health of individual plants, giving growers the precise knowledge they need for proactive management. LUNA uses this insight to drive margin for growers through crop monitoring/forecasting, space utilization, and labor planning – while giving increased pricing leverage to the sales team.
“The iUNU team has translated their long experience in greenhouses into an exciting computer vision platform powered by machine learning which empowers growers with new tools and capabilities to see, predict and take action,” said Walter Robb, executive-in-resident at S2G Ventures. “Both the magic and the mystery of plants growing comes alive in and through LUNA. It’s advanced technology supports the optimization of yield, labor and product quality, ultimately providing the end customer both superior processes and product while improving the profitability for growers.”
Greenhouse production is experiencing significant growth. In North America, the greenhouse fruit and vegetable market is growing more than 20 percent annually. As greenhouses expand their square footage to meet demand, however, labor shortages and rising labor costs pose challenges for growers. Technologies to facilitate grower productivity have become essential.
“Our communities are ‘under-greenhoused.’ Rising consumer demand is accelerating the growth of the greenhouse industry, but the massive shortage of both growers and manual labor requires a scalable machine vision solution to further the supply,” said Adam Greenberg, CEO and founder of iUNU. “We are proud to partner with S2G Ventures and Ceres Partners, as both firms share a passion for and expertise in agriculture investing, and support our vision to empower growers to do more with less.”
See related article, To water or not to water, ask the computer.
The LUNA system surpassed one billion square feet of greenhouse analysis in 2019. As a result, achieving and desired outcomes for customers has become both more precise and faster. The LUNA system has the most extensive knowledge from imaging on the market. While each grower using the LUNA platform owns their own imagery, the constant growth of the volume of imaging drives the machine learning and value the system provides. LUNA learns from reading imagery, just as people do from reading a book, providing an immeasurable depth of experience and knowledge to LUNA’s customers.
“The development and implementation of LUNA is at the forefront of technological solutions for the agricultural community,” said Perry Vieth, CEO of Ceres Partners. “We realize cutting-edge technologies will play an outsized role in the efficiency and scaling of greenhouses to meet demand, and we are proud to partner with Adam and his team to help bring LUNA to a wider market.”
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