Hexagro Urban Farming Platform

The fresh food value chain is in crisis, agriculture productivity needs to increase 60% by 2050 while 80% of the world population will live in urban areas. 

Hexagro is a hardware, software and service platform to accelerate the adoption of vertical farming technologies to empower a community of new generation urban farmers to allow anybody, anywhere access to healthy food. 

Hexagro's Urban Farming Platform connects our clients in the same network for the sharing, exchanging and eventually, selling of locally produced food online. Thanks to this approach we can impact the way consumers access fresh food by demand as they will be connected with local farmers using our systems. For example, they will distribute the initial seedlings to finish their growth cycle directly at the private customers site. 

This network is a viral and exponential approach towards Urban Farming, in which everybody becomes a part of the food system. 

The global fresh food supply chain is at risk. Centralized food production models represent one of the biggest sources of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. If we consider the challenges of Global Warming whose effect on agriculture is deeply affecting productivity worldwide by almost 7.6% in 2017, many more people that are living in the countryside will look for new opportunities in urban areas. 

● Population growth: The UN estimates that farmers will need to produce at least 50% more food by 2050 because populations are growing, and incomes are rising.
● Climate change: Changing weather conditions will have a major impact on food production, the most important agricultural regions may suffer declines in agricultural output due to climate-related changes.
● Water access: Under current trends demand for water will exceed supply by 40% in 2030.
● Food waste: The UN estimates that 1.3 B tons of food are lost or wasted annually, equating to roughly one-third of global food production, 45% of fruit and vegetables are wasted today.
● Demand for food will only continue to increase in the future according to food experts. We need technologies to increase productivity and decrease the environmental impact of food production.

Hexagro's Urban Farming Platform increases the access to vertical farming technologies and locally produced healthy food. We offer hardware, software and service solutions for consumers, companies and producers to increase the adoption of this technology. 

Consumers: we developed Poty, a compact, modular and automated vertical garden sold to households with a subscription service for resources supply to provide everything people need to start growing without a green thumb. 

Companies: we developed the Living Farming Tree, a modular, Iot-automated and stylish indoor garden (offered as-a-service) to create value for existing semi-public spaces in cities such as offices, hotels, commercial centers, etc. to increase wellness and provide an interactive experience for people to eat healthy vegetables locally. 

Producers: we developed Matu, a modular, aeroponic and low-cost vertical tower easy to install in existing greenhouses to increase productivity of an area by 5 times. Hexagro transfers its data and technical know-how to social projects to improve this systems with automation and provide a locally produced solutions to farmers in Colombia. 

With every sale we make to consumers and corporate we finance our social projects which we plan to scale up internationally, empowering farmers in developing countries with vertical farming technology. 

Traditional farmers are facing enormous challenges related to soil degradation, global warming, and urbanization. In developing countries is expensive to access vertical farming technologies with a fast ROI. Hexagro Siembra Vertical develops low-cost, modular, and soilless farming systems to increase access to sustainable agricultural methods by transferring technology from Hexagro's automated vertical farming systems to offer turnkey solutions that can be easy to launch, produced and accessed locally. 

Our customers will be able to access vertical farming technology through low-cost systems that are easy-to-use and fast to launch for a faster ROI and a larger adaptability of soilless farming methods. Thanks to the remote training, technical support, and resource supply subscription our clients will not have to worry about launching operations with new technology. 

We just launched Poty in EU to commercialize Hexagro’s products to households while selling systems to companies and foundations. Thanks to the commercialization of systems for consumers a part of the revenue is dedicated to social projects for education and diffusion of these agricultural practices. For each Poty unit sold in EU, Hexagro Siembra Vertical will install one more vertical pot in a social project in Colombia.

As previously explained, our platform solution is a way to completely cut the supply chain of fresh food and create a new food system based on a sharing and circular economy model through the adoption of urban farming technologies. These practices avoid the process of selection, processing, preservation, transportation and waste of fresh food (50% of fresh food is wasted by the end of the value chain). 

On the other hand, our platform will directly connect consumers with producers so that farmers grow exactly what the market is demanding and consumers will finalize the growing process with their own systems. 

The competitors in our sector do not offer a platform approach for the fast adoption of urban farming technology, as a main difference we are leveraging a community of like-minded people that wants to become part of the solution and support the much needed renewing of agriculture.

Hexagro develops all of its solutions taking inspiration from nature and following Nature's time proven patterns using Biomimicry. In the case of our platform we are aligned with all of its core principles:

• Nature uses only the energy it needs and relies on freely available energy.
  Existing assets in cities like people and buildings. 
• Nature recycles all materials. Circular products produced with eco friendly materials. 
• Nature is resilient to disturbances. An online demand driven market of local urban farmers.  
• Nature tends to optimize rather than maximize. Soilless-vertical farming technology to maximize space and resources. 
• Nature provides mutual benefits. Helping consumers, companies and farmers in the same platform. 
• Nature uses chemistry and materials that are safe for living beings. Our growing systems use organic fertilizers and recycled materials. 
• Nature builds using abundant resources, incorporating rare resources only sparingly. With the use of 3D Printing we manufacture locally and with the minimum materials required. 
•  Nature is locally attuned and responsive. With the use of IoT - Machine Learning automation we can adapt our systems to changing environmental conditions. 
•  Nature uses shape to determine functionality. Our hardware solutions are modular and use nature's patterns such as Hexagons for the best packaging to fill environments with plants. 

Aeroponics is the most advanced form of hydroponics: the root system of the plants hangs in the air and a nutritive mist feeds them. Oxygen and moisture are key to the process of nutrient absorption in the cycle of photosynthesis. Nutrient salts move through the plant root surface along with water and oxygen to begin the conversion cycle. These nutrients transport up into the canopy level as compounds where photosynthesis uses light energy converting CO2 and nutrient salts into plant growth while releasing oxygen and water into the air. In summary, roots need oxygen while the canopy needs carbon dioxide. Hydroponic nutrient dosing is normally managed on a batch volumetric level. Everything is mixed at one time, irrigated, and when it runs out, mixed again. Managing nutrient dosage, water acidity levels (pH), and oxygen mix is a complex process. Aeroponics supercharges plant growth with a surplus of oxygen at the root surface. When this is combined with sensor technology and dynamic nutrient recipe dosing, plant growth is superior. Thanks to the technology transfer from Hexagro, our team provides In-Vitro germinated seedlings to farmers with the best genetic characteristics and allow a superior vegetative growth.

High-pressure Aeroponics has been developed by the NASA in the 80's and has been used in the recent years from the most successful vertical farms in the world such as Aerofarms because it allows to create light-weight structures and have a further reduction in water and fertilzier consumption. 

Aeroponics is a difficult method because it requires a lot of automation and sensing, our team has developed a propietary software and electronic mechanisms to overcome the challenges in nutrient dosing and balancing. Further more, thanks to the partnership with industry leaders, we overcome challenges such as the clogging of irrigation nozzles which is a common problem in aeroponic set ups. 

On the other hand, we are developing In-Vitro germination technology that will allow our team to ship special varieties of lab-grown plants internationally while preserving them in a good state during shelf like or transportation to be further propagated in Aeroponics. 

Society started because of the implementation of agriculture, it gave us the possibility to establish settlements without the need for gathering or hunting to find a food source. It changed and shaped humanity and our world. 

We beleive agriculture can change our world again by incorporating it into our lives with urban farming, it not only represents a solution for a more resilient food system but it can also provide a series of positive effects in terms of community empowerment, food justice, food security, health and mental wellbeing and even the economy.

Immagine a future in which everybody grows something, it would be like we used to do in our gardens some decades ago where the way to have a full meal was exchanging the over production of certain croptypes with local producers in the community. This time we can do the same thanks to the different technologies that can make the act of farming easier. 

By integrating digital technologies in a food system we can know who grew our food, under which exact conditions and the impact that it had in terms of resource consumption. This can be a disruptive, exponential and transformative solution and a way to have a more resilient food system! 

Our community-platform approach is the "uberization" of urban farming, people will buy our solutions to become part of the community and they will be empowered to become micro-entrepreneurs by using the space they have available and growing plants for local buyers. 

All of the data, sales, R&D and technology we are able to gather and develop will empower farmers in developing countries as they will increasingly adopt our solutions.  

Currently we have around 50 private customers of our consumer product as it has been recently launched, we have around 20 corporate clients for our hardware-as-a-service solution and around 3 farmer pilots in Colombia with one foundation using our systems for social projects. 

We are planning to serve 100 people by the end of this year, and 10,000 in three years thanks to the viral approach of our future community. We calculate that the total beneficiaries in 5 years for the different business model that we are implementing we can impact around 500,000 people or even more, taking into account our corporate clients (employees) and the producers (farmers and more).  

Five year plan

• Scale up internationally our consumer and corporate sales in Europe and hopefully US and Asia. 
• Partnerships with governments, foundations and institutions to scale up our Urban Farming Plaftorm. 
• Opening of platform to other actors in the sector to contribute with their solutions and increase the adoption of urban farmers. 
• Implementing open innovation in our platform so that people can contribute with their own ideas and experience using our platform products. 
• Increasing the amount of beneficiaries of our social projects by making installations in more countries. 

• Fiannancial barries
• Market barriers
• Regulatory barriers

• Financial barriers: we launched a new product for consumers that can be commercialized easily in order to build our platform and building a track-record to be presented to investors and raise funds to continue the development of our technology and solutions
• Market barriers: we are doing a lot of different marketing activities and events to increase the awareness of the benefits of urban farming and its impacts. We have developed a digital experience interface in which our customers get guided without the need of a green thumb and we expect that together with our subscription service the adoption of our solutions can be higher. 
• Regulatory barriers: we are actively taking to policy makers to understand the shifts needed in regulations to increase the adoption of urban farming. For example, in a lot of countries is not allowed to sell food produced at home without permission, we hope that this can change in order to have a marketplace of urban farmers driven by demand. If this is not possible we will limit the platform to exchanges of food by sharing or trading without having to buy/sell.

6 Full time members

2 part-time members

2 freelancers

5 mentors and advisors

3 international partner organizations: Ellen MacArhtur Foundation, Solar Impulse, and Singularity University

Hexagro’s founding team has the necessary backgrounds in design, engineering and business development in order to successfully lead a multidisciplinary team. The diversity of the manager’s backgrounds and team professions allows the capillary scalability of the team by organizing the key activities of our company into Management and three main pillars: Product-Service Development, Operations Development and Commercial Development. In order to fill the gap of strong finance knowledge, our team has the support from an Advisory Board and our investors which advises the team on the financial modeling for the growth of the company. Recently, the Hexagro management team has integrated an advisor with the role of CFO to the team, John Cooper (US).

• Singularity University Ventures: a startup program from Singularity University that is dedicated to support entrepreneurs who are leveraging technology to solve humanity's grand challenges. In our case we are addressing the Food challenge and as part of our participation we are supported by a network of world class mentors, experts and investors. The participation to bootcamps and events is free of charge for the next 10 years. We are the first startup in their portfolio in the indoor farming sector.
• World Alliance for Efficient Solutions: this organization was founded by Solar Impulse and they strive to bring together the main actors in the field of clean technologies in order to create synergies that will ultimately speed-up the implementation of clean and profitable solutions which have the potential to address the environmental challenges of today.
• Ellen MacArthur Foundation: this non-profit organization’s mission is to accelerate the transition to a circular economy. We have been awarded by Intesa San Paolo during Seeds and Chips 2018 event to participate into the Circular Economy 100 innovation program to enable organizations to develop new opportunities and realize our circular economy ambitions faster. It brings together corporates, governments and cities, academic institutions, emerging innovators and affiliates in a unique multi-stakeholder platform.

Hexagro leverages different business models to access various revenue streams starting from the direct sale of two product lines: Poty and the Living Farming Tree (LFT). 

With the Poty product line we are able to make 50% margins in the hardware sales and 40% margins on the monthly subscription which will boost our member affiliations and the online Hexagro urban farmers community. 

The unit procurement cost has been calculated for an initial of 100 LFT units and will decrease by 30% at least after full industrialization. After a market validation, the final market price for direct sales has been quantified in: €2,000/unit for S Kit (24 plants), €2,500/unit for M Kit (42 plants), €3,200/unit for L Kit (78 plants). Currently, Hexagro team is talking to leasing companies in europe to finance the costs of manufacturing the hardware and offer a lease-to-rent option for 24 months as: 42 euros/month S Kit, 50 euros/month M Kit, and 60 euros/month L Kit with a resource supply subscription service of 30-45 euros depending on the quantity of systems per month for each system.

Solve challenge can help us to access different experts and mentors to support us on the barriers we are facing in terms of financing, commercialization and marketing. We would also like to understand the possibilities to find new team members through this network as well as learning about technologies and new business models to increase our impact. Of course, if we have some support with any possible grants that will be always helpful to advance faster in the development of our vision.

MIT Faculty and Solve Members, we think both can be of great support and very interesting to connect with. 

Eventually we would like to partner-up with organization in the network that can support us to scale up our business model and why not, collaborating for any kind of implementations in our sector. 

We have thought several times of offering our social project solutions for initiatives that can empower refugees in Europe to work in vertical farming, we can educate them to learn how to grow food with our products. 

Our approach can eventually impact millions of lives and the environment if we manage to scale our platform globally through the adoption of urban farming technology.