Many Celebs Starts To Invest In Bowery Farming Startup
- Business Startup
Niccolo Romano- 0
- 4 minutes read
Natalie Portman is an actor who is well known for her roles as her commitment to causes ranging from the environment to animal welfare, has extended her financial support on a new investment sphere for Bowery Farming startup. Bowery farming location is in the U.S. Along with that Bowery, farming valuation is estimated at over $300 million from both investment groups and individuals to help extend its operations across the U.S.
Irving Fain, Bowery Farming CEO and Founder asserted in a press release.
"At Bowery, we're reinventing a new supply chain that's simpler, safer, more sustainable and ultimately provides vibrantly flavorful produce unlike what's available today."
He further added that,
"This infusion of new capital from Fidelity, other new investors, and the additional support of our long-term investor partners is an acknowledgment of the critical need for new solutions to our current agricultural system, and the enormous economic opportunity that comes with supporting our mission.”
Joining Portman in the latest investment round for Bowery, which has raised more than $465 million since the time it was founded in 2014, were well-known plant-based eating supporters Lewis Hamilton and Chris Paul, as well as world-known chef and hunger supporter José Andrés and singer-composer Justin Timberlake.
Vertical Farming Reaches New Heights With Bowery Farming Startup
So why is everyone from investment groups to celebrities investing money at Bowery? Simply put, the cynicism around vertical farming that initiated early growth has been replaced with shining enthusiasm in the course of its success.
In 2020, Bowery Farming stock went from selling produce in under 100 retail locations across the U.S. to nearly 900. According to Fain,
“These include such giants as Whole Foods Market, Giant Food, Stop & Shop, Walmart, and Weis Markets”
Fain told in an interview,
“It’s definitely bigger than the pandemic.”
He further added,
“What you’re seeing is a food system that’s evolving and [people have a desire] to see transparency and traceability in the food system.”
Currently Bowery has two vertical farming lands in Maryland and New Jersey, with a third slated to open in Bethlehem, PA by the end of this year. Each industrial area features various herbs and greens (butter lettuce, cilantro, arugula, etc.) kept vertically in trays and grown through farming using a “state-of-the-art” computer control system and also LED lights. An average of 80,000 pounds of produce is brought about each week using 95% less water than primitive farms and with zero chemicals or pesticides. And because these vertical farms can be constructed within cities, transport costs and their relevant environmental impacts have been awfully reduced.
In an interview Fain said,
“We achieve a plant vision system and that vision system takes photos of our crops in real time and runs them through our machine learning algorithms.”
He further added,
“We know what’s happening with a crop right now and whether it’s healthy, but then also predict what we will see with this crop based on what we’ve seen in the past and what tweaks and changes we want to make.”
“I actually view it as this incredibly optimistic opportunity to say, ‘Wow, like, isn't it amazing that technology has taken us to a point where something that we've done in a certain way for hundreds and hundreds of years with iteration and optimization can really be rethought and re-imagined in totality because of human creativity and human ingenuity? And I think that's actually exciting and that's something that we should be happy about and optimistic about. And that to me is really the message in what we're building at Bowery.”
