iUNU Secures $7M in Funding for Greenhouse Tech Solutions
iUNU, an industrial computer vision company providing prevision agriculture solutions to indoor growers, has raised $7 million in an oversubscribed Series A financing led by S2G Ventures and Ceres Partners with participation from Serra Ventures.
iUNU is transforming the way indoor growers do business by harnessing the power of computer vision through its product offering, LUNA. 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 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.”
“Both the magic and the mystery of plants growing comes alive in and through LUNA,” said Walter Robb, executive-in-resident at S2G. “Its advanced technology supports the optimization of yield, labor and product quality, ultimately providing the end consumer 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% 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.
“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.”
Cristina Rohr will join the board of directors, and Andrew Howell, vice president at Ceres Partners, will become a board observer.
For more information, go to www.iunu.com.
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