What is the name of your organization?
LATERAL.systems
What is the name of your solution?
LATERAL Edge Platform
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
A water and atmospheric monitoring platform tuned for indoor farms to support tactical and strategic farm management.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Portland, OR, USA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
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What specific problem are you solving?
LATERAL’s edge-based IoT platform aims to democratize advanced farm monitoring and management for indoor agriculture, bridging the digital divide and enabling data-driven decision-making for a global community of growers. LATERAL’s automated monitoring solution is designed to overcome key barriers such as hardware/software interoperability and limited internet connectivity with modular, interoperable sensors and edge computing to provide real-time insights, lowering costs, reducing data latency, and enhancing data security. By 2050 farmers will need to increase production by 70% to feed 9-billion people. While food supply per capita increased more than 30% since 1961, this involved an 800% increase in use of polluting fertilizers and a 100% increase of fresh water for irrigation accounting for nearly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals. Well-managed indoor farms can yield up to 400 times more per acre using 5% of the water and allow for year-round harvests, sustainably supplementing production even within the context of increasingly scarce fresh water availability and arable land due to climate pressures. However, everything grows faster inside, including imbalances that contribute to over 50% of indoor farms to fail within the first 5-years. Thus, predictive insights to inform tactical and strategic planning are invaluable to the viability of this emerging industry.
What is your solution?
LATERAL is developing an interoperable hardware and software monitoring solution that synthesizes and interprets sensor readings to make data readily useful and secure. As timestamped readings captured at routine intervals from multiple sensors are fused, local system analytics monitor relationships to provide automated monitoring, alerts, and alarms, and narrative potential solutions notifications to enable users to anticipate and avert significant abiotic and biotic stresses.
The LATERAL framework is sensor communication protocol agnostics; users can plug in a wide variety of sensor product lines and sensor types to avoid supply chain issues and expand monitoring potentials. It is also platform agnostic; users can access dashboard views using iOS or Android devices. LATERAL’s dashboard views (insert link to UI demo here) are designed to scaffold up complexity to support novice farmers to learn to interpret and apply data signals to improve efficiencies and avoid problems. We have designed to architecture to scale to any size operation, including geographically remote locations with multiple buildings and grow beds/towers. Our rules engine architecture supports default set points for produce, mushrooms, algae, and insect tolerance ranges, which farmers may customize to create their own Grow Profiles suitable for local pressures and dynamic growth stages.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our primary target are mid-to-large-sized indoor commercial food producers. As a secondary focus, we will serve educational institutions—including universities engaged in workforce development and agricultural research, science museums, and K-12 schools. This broader community remains under-served, as most off-the-shelf solutions are tailored for cannabis producers or enterprise-scale operations and prohibitively expensive for typical food growers. Furthermore, nearly all competitors—except two—offer exclusively cloud-based systems, which limits accessibility, especially for rural farmers who often lack reliable high-speed internet connectivity across their operations. Our edge-based solution extends the availability of advanced data analytics to an estimated 63% of farms worldwide that lack reliable internet access and therefore are currently unable to access cloud-based monitoring solutions shown to support success.
In the U.S., the average farm worker has a 6th to 9th grade level of education, a trend mirrored globally. Most agricultural workers acquire data literacy and agronomic expertise on the job. Rather than deskilling workers by doing the thinking for them, LATERAL is designing AI features and our UI to support and enhance learning. Our data visualizations are intentionally crafted to make insights accessible and actionable, ensuring that tactical and longer-term strategic treatment protocols and responses are understood.
