[doctoboggan]

I thought the technology looked familiar. I had been following the Bright Agrotech people on YouTube for a while, they produced great content for those interested in indoor hydroponics for the home grower.

Do you know what happened to the company? Did they go bankrupt and have to liquidate their IP?

[elcritch]

Sibling is correct. Plenty Ag acquired Bright Agrotech for people and IP. Bright was profitable but faced a difficult time scaling. It’s business model depended on individuals getting enough capital to start a farm. Many farms were profitable, but not all, and it’s difficult finding lots of people wanting to take out loans to start farms and banks didn’t understand the idea of indoor farms. Plenty Ag raised $200 million (largely from SoftBank) and needed to get a jumpstart on working tech and experts in the field. I’m still hopeful that once indoor farming tech keeps improving (based partly on large investment in the Plenty’s of the world) and banks accept indoor farms that individuals will be able to easily run indoor farms. A big part of that would be more labor automation. Plus if an asteroid ever hits Earth knowing how to grow indoor food would be valuable. ;) More realistically (hopefully!) indoor farming will be critical for colonizing Mars or asteroids. Long term, indoor farming and vertical farming will be critical technology for humanity to perfect, IMHO. An example (and fun) tech innovation was Bright’s invention of “water cooled LED towers”. That’s an early “Google style” innovation akin to using trays of cheap servers. Regardless hardware innovation takes massive amounts of capital. I’m hoping the Plenty Ag people are able to make fresh produce “a thing”! Edit: link to water cooled led’s https://info.brightagrotech.com/hubfs/Downloadable_Guides/Co...

[eurekaSky]

They were bought out by a company from Cali. Bright Agrotech started in Laramie Wyoming.

Their first "major" greenhouses were behind the building that my company was in. Really interesting people.