- hexafarms raised €4.8M in seed funding led by Ananda Impact Ventures and Green Generation Fund.
- More than 50 growers in 13 countries already use its sensors, forecasts and scouting robots.
- Customers managed over €300M of produce on its system in 2026, the company says.
Greenhouse growers can leave up to 30% of their potential yield unrealised, according to hexafarms’ own analysis. Growing conditions drift from the optimum, harvest forecasts prove wrong, and pests and disease are spotted only after the damage is visible.
Berlin-based hexafarms has raised €4.8 million in seed funding to catch those problems earlier, using wireless sensors, yield-forecasting software, and robots that scan every plant.
The round was led by Ananda Impact Ventures and Green Generation Fund, with participation from Grey Silo Ventures and better ventures, alongside existing backers Speedinvest, Mudcake and Techstars. The money will go into wireless crop sensing, automated pest and disease scouting, and expansion across the DACH region, the Benelux countries and Spain.
“For decades, horticulture has invested heavily in automation, infrastructure and crop inputs to lift grower margins, but there is still a fundamental gap in how we understand and manage production at scale. The opportunity is not simply to automate more tasks, but to give growers the intelligence to act on what’s happening in the crop before it costs them yield,” said David Ahme, hexafarms’ CEO and co-founder.
From dashboards to robots, on subscription
hexafarms was founded in 2021 by Ahmed, Huijo Kim and Felix Kirschstein in Berlin. When Tech Funding News covered its €1.3 million pre-seed round in May 2024, led by Speedinvest, it noted that the company sold software for greenhouses and vertical indoor farms, and that its total funding had passed €2.5 million.
The company has since moved to what it calls an operating system for commercial horticulture. Its wireless sensors record climate, fertigation (fertiliser delivered through irrigation water), substrate, drainage and light data every five minutes. Forecasting models use more than 70 parameters to produce rolling harvest forecasts for each crop and production zone.
Robots scan every plant daily across two to three hectares, looking for early signs of pests and disease. The AI models cover around 50 cultivars, including tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, aubergines and berries.
Because the three data streams sit in one system, a grower can, for example, trace a pest outbreak against the climate history of a single production zone. The platform works across greenhouses, foil tunnels and open-field production, and it is built to plug into the climate computers growers already run, including those from Priva, Hoogendoorn and Ridder.
Growers pay a subscription, while hexafarms designs, deploys and maintains the hardware and keeps ownership of it. That moves the cost for growers from capital spending to operating spending. It also means hexafarms, not the grower, carries the cost of owning the hardware.
More than 50 growers in 13 countries use the technology. They include SanLucar, which the company describes as one of Europe’s largest fruit and vegetable companies, and the grower cooperatives Elo and Royal ZON. Customers managed more than €300 million worth of produce on the system in 2026, according to hexafarms.
“Across the markets we sell into, growers are asking the same basic questions: what is happening in the crop right now, what are we likely to harvest, and where are we at risk of losing yield? Our focus now is taking what we have proven with existing customers and scaling it across those markets,” said Max Seidl, head of go-to-market at hexafarms.
A crowded greenhouse field, split between software and robots
The global greenhouse market was worth $32.8 billion in 2025 and should reach $74.1 billion by 2033, a compound annual growth rate of 10.9% from 2026, according to Grand View Research. Europe held more than 31% of it. The firm’s smart greenhouse segment, the closer fit for hexafarms, is smaller but faster: $5.8 billion in 2025, rising to $18 billion by 2033 at 15.4% a year.
Rivals have picked different approaches. Amsterdam’s Source.ag builds AI software for greenhouses and raised $17.5 million in a Series B round in November 2025, bringing its total funding past $60 million. Its software runs in more than 300 greenhouses across 18 countries. Spain’s Grodi raised €2.5 million in February 2026 for VEGA 11, an autonomous robot that scans plants in Mediterranean greenhouses, the closest match to hexafarms’ scouting robots.
Cologne-based Eternal.ag raised €8 million in March 2026 for tomato-harvesting robots, a job hexafarms does not list among its products. US-based Orchard Robotics raised a $22 million Series A in September 2025 for tractor-mounted cameras that count fruit in orchards and vineyards, which puts it outdoors rather than in greenhouses.
Money for the sector is tighter than it was. As TFN reported in June 2026, agrifood tech investment fell from $51.7 billion in 2021 to $16 billion in 2024, about the same as in 2016. Against that backdrop, hexafarms has raised €4.8 million plus a loan of up to €800,000 while owning its hardware. Source.ag has raised more than $60 million for software alone.
Why the investors backed it
Ananda is a Munich-based impact investor founded in 2009. It closed a record €73 million first close for its fifth fund in January 2026 and earlier backed OroraTech, a satellite-based wildfire detection company.
Partner Bernd Klosterkemper said hexafarms’ mix of software and hardware was the draw: “The world needs to produce significantly more food, yet there is very little additional land available to do it. Most companies tackling this challenge focus on either software or hardware. hexafarms has built both and, crucially, structured its business so the two work together. Every sensor, camera and robot feeds the same models, making the platform smarter with every greenhouse it enters.”
Green Generation Fund is a Berlin-based, female-led seed investor that raised €100 million in 2022 and has backed the plant-based egg maker Neggst and the regenerative-farming software company Klim. Partner Peter Dorfner pointed to physical AI, the application of AI to machines that work in the real world. RobCo, the Munich robotics company that sells factory robots as a service, passed a $1 billion valuation on October 5, 2026.
“Physical AI is one of the most talked-about ideas in tech right now, but many companies in this space are still proving the concept. hexafarms already has more than 50 growers running on its platform and has real commercial traction behind the technology,” added Dorfner.
Grey Silo Ventures is the corporate venture arm of Cereal Docks Group and invests in agtech and food tech startups. Investment manager Matteo Leonardi noted: “We invest where we can bring more than capital, combining our industrial expertise with the right partnerships to help businesses scale.”
Klosterkemper’s claim is the one to watch. A data advantage only exists if each new greenhouse feeds the models faster than the hardware bill grows, and a €4.8 million round has to carry both.
