• Agricool

  Participated · Equity · Dec 2018

  Agricool builds climate-controlled container farms to grow fruits and vegetables in urban areas, starting with strawberries. The company replaces sunlight with intensive LED lighting and controls temperature, humidity and light spectrum to enable year‑round cultivation and reduce water use. Its produce is marketed as locally produced, GMO‑free and pesticide‑free; Agricool already supplies strawberries to some Monoprix stores in Paris. The container approach aims to cut transportation emissions and improve efficiency compared with traditional agriculture. Agricool plans to deploy 100 containers by 2021 in Paris and Dubai and expects to hire about 200 people to support that growth. The company intends to expand beyond strawberries into other fruits and vegetables. Agricool grows strawberries (and plans to grow other fruits and vegetables) inside climate‑controlled containers by tightly controlling temperature, humidity, CO2, light spectrum and day/night cycles. The company prototyped custom LEDs and has produced six container prototypes in the past 12 months, using a warehouse outside Paris to A/B test growing conditions in refrigerated rooms. Agricool plans to industrialize container production, outsource manufacturing, and deploy containers around major cities globally; this summer it will place five containers around Paris. Management says the model cuts out middlemen, allowing a 250g pack of strawberries to sell for €4 versus ~€6.70 for organic French strawberries. The company is considering a franchise model where Agricool would handle R&D, containers and branding while partners operate and sell produce. Agricool emphasizes no pesticides, no GMOs, same‑day harvest-and-sale, and expanding to lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis and bell peppers. Agricool grows strawberries and plans to expand to other fruits and vegetables inside repurposed shipping containers ("cooltainers"). The company controls light, water, substrate and other factors to produce crops without pesticides. Agricool is renting a large warehouse to fill with containers and runs iterative A/B-style testing on growing conditions. With new funding, the startup plans to create 75 containers in 2017 and install them around Paris to produce a targeted 91 tons of strawberries. The team says some crops may be harder to adapt to container growth and will test vegetables and other fruits soon. The effort is described as capital-intensive as the company optimizes its container systems and scales deployment.

No current team members are available.