David Ashton grew up outside of Sacramento, California, and attended college in San Luis Obispo during the historic drought of the late 2000s. For years, he drove the 300-mile stretch between the two cities, captivated by the endless lettuce farms, acres of leafy green plants set against a dry, bleak landscape. The fact that these lush crops were grown in drought conditions only to be shipped across the country stayed with him and later inspired his robotic farming startup, Canopii, which aims to shorten produce supply chains.
Based in Portland, Oregon, Canopii builds robotic greenhouses that can autonomously manage the entire crop-growing process from seeding to harvest without any human intervention. A single greenhouse can produce up to 40,000 pounds of produce each year while requiring only one spigot of water and occupying a space the size of a basketball court.
The farms are manufactured by GK Designs and are currently engineered to grow herbs and specialty greens like baby bok choy and gai lan, a type of Chinese broccoli. Ashton shared that he began seriously developing the plans for Canopii after the Portland agtech company he was set to join filed for bankruptcy while he was driving up the coast to move there. He worked on the designs at night while his wife was in medical school.
After three years, he applied for a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to build a prototype. Following that success, he secured a $1 million grant to construct a full-scale version. Now, five years later, the company has reached a major milestone. They have created an autonomous farm that grows everything from seed to harvest without human intervention, achieving this with a small team and very little capital, an approach Ashton notes is quite different from the rest of the industry.
To date, the company has raised approximately $3.6 million, with $2.3 million coming largely from grants and the remainder from strategic partners.
Ashton is aware of investor skepticism toward the indoor farming category, a once-hot sector that saw companies raise hundreds of millions only to face bankruptcy. He argues Canopii’s product is fundamentally different from vertical farms and that the company’s deliberate, slow pace and avoidance of venture capital early on have helped it sidestep many common pitfalls.
He believes the capital structure must be diversified beyond venture funding. The company has focused on iterating and learning from a single farm for five years, a strategy that would not have been possible, he says, if they had taken venture capital and tried to scale immediately.
Canopii has attracted interest from schools, restaurants, casinos, and other institutions. Having achieved its automation milestone, the company now looks to build its first commercial farm in downtown Portland. Future plans include franchising these farms and, eventually, raising venture capital once the model is fully ready.
Ashton compares the farm’s production to that of a car. A significant achievement, he notes, is that the entire operation runs on 100 amps and 240 volts, which is standard household power. This means the farm can literally be placed in a backyard, demonstrating the level of resource management the team has accomplished.