Labour shortages are quietly putting Europe’s greenhouses at risk. These greenhouses are the backbone of our fresh produce, especially as climate and resource challenges keep piling up. Even in the most advanced regions, growers are struggling to find skilled hands for the toughest jobs, such as harvesting, while demand and sustainability targets continue to rise.
In a talk with TFN, Renji John, co-founder and CEO of Eternal.ag, said labour is now the biggest bottleneck in greenhouses. He noted, “If you do not address the labour shortages that happen within greenhouses, then you can’t scale for food production.”
Renji’s Cologne-based startup just closed an €8M round, backed by Simon Capital, Oyster Bay Venture Capital, EquityPitcher Ventures, and Backbone Ventures. They plan to use the funds to launch their solution: a fully autonomous harvesting robot that works around the clock.
This fresh funding will power Eternal.ag’s rollout across Western Europe and, over time, its expansion beyond tomatoes into new crops.
From food safety scare to autonomous greenhouses
John’s path into agri-tech is unique. He studied mechanical engineering, worked at Boston Consulting Group on private equity projects, earned an MBA at INSEAD, and began a PhD at Erasmus University. This blend of technical and business skills helps him solve engineering challenges and earn the trust of careful growers.
The idea for Eternal.ag started with a personal experience in India. A family member fell ill after eating vegetables from a local market, despite a thorough wash. For John, that moment triggered a deep dive into food safety and the hidden risks in our supply chains.
Digging deeper into food production, John quickly focused on scaling it safely despite rising pressure on land and water. He pointed out that, with water shortages and limited land, farming needs to shift more toward protected spaces like greenhouses. For him, it’s all about resilience and efficiency.
According to John, high‑tech greenhouses use around 95% less water than open‑air agriculture and can achieve about 15 times the productivity. He sees them as a highly sustainable and economically viable way to produce food at scale.
“With water scarcity and land use issues, farming has to move more into protected environments. Setting up a greenhouse is easy with bank loans. But labour is the highest cost and hardest to find. Without fixing labour shortages, we can’t grow food production. Our goal is to turn greenhouses worldwide into fully automated farms using robotics and AI,” John adds.
How the robot actually works
Eternal.ag’s main product, Harvester, is built to handle the complexity of living plants rather than the static, predictable environments found in factories.
John explained the system as a simple robotics loop: sensing, thinking, and acting. First, the robot senses its surroundings and learns the plant. Then, computer vision models analyse the structure and ripeness of the tomatoes, picking out which to harvest first (usually the lowest, ripest bunch).
Moving from seeing to acting is where things get tricky. The robotic arm has to plan its path carefully, grabbing and cutting each tomato without bumping into the rest of the plant. Eternal.ag runs AI models right on the robot, making these decisions in real time.
Besides the arm, Harvester moves on its own through the greenhouse, navigating rows and work areas with zero human help. The goal is to solve real labour shortages and free up workers for higher-value tasks, not endless leaf-cutting or fruit-picking.
A key design principle is that customers don’t need to change their existing greenhouse setup for the robots to work. The idea is that growers can simply put the robot inside and have it operate within their current environment.
To make this work, Eternal.ag uses a simulation-first approach. Instead of mostly relying on slow, costly on-site tests, they create physics-accurate digital twins of customers’ greenhouses. Harvester then runs in these virtual environments for long periods.
“By deployment, the robot has already run 10,000 hours in simulation,” John says.
Simulation-first development is common in automotive and aerospace robotics. Waymo uses it a lot, but it’s still rare in agricultural robotics startups, where field testing is usually the standard. If Eternal.ag’s simulations perform well in real life, it could cut development costs that have held others back.
A business model built around grower risk
Eternal.ag doesn’t sell its robots outright. Instead, it offers Harvester as a service, letting growers pay based on how much they use it and the results they achieve, rather than making a big upfront investment.
John explained that the company’s success is deliberately aligned with its customers’ success. As he put it, “Our success is aligned with the success of the grower. So when the grower succeeds, then we succeed.”
In an industry with tight margins and plenty of family-owned businesses, this model lowers the barrier to advanced automation. Eternal.ag keeps ownership of the robots and handles all the maintenance and upgrades. Early interest has been strong: after just a couple of conversations, some customers are already eager to get started and even willing to buy robots outright, which John sees as proof that the problem is real.
Eternal.ag has already landed its first commercial customer in the Netherlands, with more in the pipeline.
A crowded and difficult space
Eternal.ag is entering a field where other companies have worked on agricultural robotics and greenhouse automation for years. John called these earlier players pioneers who helped prove the market exists by showing labour shortages are a key problem.
The sector has faced setbacks too. The recent closure of US startup Tortuga, which had strong funding and a similar focus on full autonomy and robots-as-a-service, shows how hard it is to achieve solid commercial results in real-world conditions.
Across the industry, robots still struggle to match humans for speed and gentle handling, especially with delicate crops like tomatoes. Growers want perfect fruit, not bruises, no matter how slick the tech looks on paper.
Eternal.ag is betting on simulation, full autonomy, and plug-and-play with existing infrastructure to crack these challenges. But as John admits, the real proof will come from live deployment data in the coming months.
The European greenhouse advantage
Eternal.ag is launching in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Benelux region. John said this is a deliberate choice since Europe, especially the Netherlands, leads the world in high-tech greenhouse technology.
The company is negotiating with Swiss growers and expects to announce its first public commercial case study soon. After the Western European launch, global expansion is planned, though John remains cautious about the pace.
He’s optimistic about Europe’s future in this field and disagrees with the idea that deep tech receives better funding elsewhere. “I’m a big supporter of starting a business in Europe,” he says, but adds one concern: “Europe isn’t easy for raising big money for tough problems. I hope it becomes more supportive so we can keep our lead.”
All four investors in this round focus on the DACH region, indicating strong local support for European deep-tech, but this could limit Eternal.ag’s international growth.
What comes next
With new capital, Eternal.ag aims to accelerate deployment in the Netherlands and Germany, strengthen existing partnerships, and develop modules for new crops. Cucumbers follow tomatoes, but their morphology requires significant re-engineering beyond software updates.
The team is growing fast in both Cologne and Bangalore. Two hubs mean access to a bigger pool of engineering talent than Europe alone can offer right now, while keeping business leadership close to the main market.
The true test lies in performance data from real-world deployments over the next six to twelve months. If Harvester matches human labour in harvest cycle times and damage rates, the path to Series A and European scale is clear. If previous gaps persist, prospects will change rapidly.
