Adaviv — The Future of Indoor Farming
By: Stephen Braunewell
Tags: Cannabis, Farming, SaaS, Greenhouse, AI

Adaviv — The Future of Indoor Farming

The Problem

Crop loss is a $220B problem today in agriculture. Pest, disease, and plant stress factors consistently cause 10% to 40% yield loss, leaving indoor and greenhouse farmers scratching their heads on why harvests vary by up to 30%. It’s impossible to keep skilled eyes on every plant and these issues are not discovered until they have already affected the yield potential of the plants.

What The Company Does

Using AdaViv’s early detection and intervention software will drastically improve consistency and drive yield by over 25%. An automated crop scanner moves along greenhouse walkways, non-invasively scanning the plants to detect and track plant stress, pests and diseases. An in-house data processing, annotation and modeling pipeline translates this data into plant health key performance indicators. AdaViv’s apps integrate these with other cultivation inputs and tasks, enabling workers to quickly locate and resolve all sources of yield loss. This includes flash reports and dashboards which provide visibility and yield forecasting to managers, driving better decisions across the organization chart including supply/portfolio management.

Market

Adaviv will first conquer their beachhead market of cannabis, a $1B market in in North America and $2B global market that is growing at around 30% compound annual growth rate. This will hopefully gain sufficient revenue and margins to leverage and transfer into their next categories within controlled environment agriculture (CEA) like tomatoes, leafy greens, organic vegetables and berries, which is a $10B global market. Multiple players can exist, but AdaViv is a first-mover in cannabis and an in-house pipeline enables scaling quickly to other crops.

Business Model

Today, Adaviv employs a SaaS business model and prices their subscription fee on a per square foot, annual basis charged monthly. They offer free short trial periods of around two crop cycles to show the return on investment, before transitioning to a SAAS business model. In the medium term, Adaviv will test profit sharing business models wherein they set yield improvement targets and provide the solution at freemium. Once the yield target is achieved they take a portion of the profit generation.

Traction

Adaviv’s solutions are currently active in paying pilot customers and they have built a strong customer pipeline and are in discussions with their next six customers for projects to execute on in 2021, representing a potential contract value of $9M. Adaviv has been selected into the Creative Destruction Lab Atech Stream, an organization that delivers an objectives-based program for massively scalable, seed-stage, science- and technology-based companies. They also graduated from MIT’s preeminent accelerator program, Delta V, along with the MIT Design X incubator. They have built an industry expert cannabis advisory board with C-level executives from top brands and have been in discussions with major agriculture industry suppliers like Corteva and Signify Lighting for future partnerships.

Founding Team Background

CEO Ian Seiferling has worked extensively across domains of ecology, urban agriculture and climate adaptation including developing widely-used computer vision-based tools to measure and monitor the health of urban trees. COO Julian Ortiz has been president of the MIT Agriculture Club, and has established a sustainability consulting company in Colombia that has trained more than 400 SMEs. CTO Moe Vazifeh has a portfolio of high-impact research and algorithm development across physics, AI and network dynamics and his time at Amazon Alexa. His work on optimizing taxi fleets and charging stations was published as the cover feature in Nature.

What They Need Help With

Adaviv is currently raising their next round of capital in order to grow the team and execute on their customer pipeline. Likewise, the team is keen to develop relationships with potential advisors that have expertise and experience on any of the aforementioned dimensions or technical areas such as computer vision, machine learning, and agronomy. If you have business or network in Adaviv’s beachhead market, the team will be excited to talk as well and would highly value potential customer introductions. Connect with The Adaviv Team.

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