Farming tech firm Vertical Future is in the course of raising £60 million in a fresh funding round, the Standard can reveal.
The London-based business is seeking to expand operations as it eyes partnerships with major supermarkets to develop giant UK-based vertical farms.
It comes at a difficult time for the vertical farming sector that has seen a string of collapses as businesses struggled to raise the cash to fuel operations. In June, US-based AeroFarms entered administration, while French firm Agricool went into receivership earlier in the year.
But Vertical Future CEO Jamie Burrows insisted his business was not headed in the same direction.
“A lot of the bigger [vertical farming] companies that raised ridiculous sums of money were going to encounter difficulties because they didn’t really have the right approach to technology…they tried to scale too quickly with the wrong tech,” he told the Standard.
“[But] It’s a really interesting time for us, with some really big projects. We’re in very good cash position, we’re a very different business and we manufacture most of our own systems.”
The company began operations in 2016 with the construction of a small vertical farm in Deptford, South London to grow ‘minicrops’ such as herbs. It has since expanded to develop its own hardware and software solutions.
The firm last completed a £21 million Series A funding round in early 2022, the largest of its kind for a vertical farming business, which valued it at £100 million.
“We decided we wanted to focus more on the technology because most of the technology in the sector had come from Dutch glasshouses,” Burrows said.
“The technologies were OK…but we realised that the systems were really inefficient, you couldn’t reach economies of scale, the capex per square metre was too high, and there was no real supplier out there that was providing an integrated solution.
“We’ve built eight farms in the UK…people come to us, we do the designing and we go and build the farms.”
A Vertical Future spokesperson said the amount raised could differ from the suggested £60 million when the funding round is eventually closed.
