Fifth Season developed an indoor farming system that uses roughly 40 robots to automate storage, retrieval, harvesting, pest and disease management, scouting, seeding, and media packaging while humans orchestrate recipes and tasks. The company was incubated at Carnegie Mellon University’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship and refined its technology through two R&D vertical farms in Pittsburgh’s South Side. It sells test-farm produce to local retailers including Giant Eagle and Whole Foods and to restaurants, and will supply grocery stores and restaurants from its flagship site. Fifth Season is launching a roughly 60,000 sq ft commercial-scale vertical farm in Braddock, outside Pittsburgh, and plans staged expansion to similarly sized U.S. cities. The startup emphasizes lower labor costs (claiming a reduction to about 20% of operating costs at full scale versus 40–60% in traditional vertical farms) and competitive pricing, while highlighting hyper-local, fresh, pesticide-free produce. It is pursuing sustainability measures at the Braddock farm, including a microgrid with partial solar and peak shaving while monitoring energy and water challenges in the industry.

Total raised

$35M

Funding rounds

1

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Sep 2019