As indoor farming expands, a number of new companies are cropping up to provide better data and monitoring tools for the businesses aimed at improving efficiencies and quality of indoor crops.
One of these companies, the Copenhagen-based Nordetect, is entering the U.S. market with around $1.5 million in funding from government investment firms and traditional accelerators like SOSV, with a tech that the company claims can give vertical farms a better way to monitor and manage nutrients and water quality.
The two co-founders have known each other since they were undergraduates in India eight years ago. They went on to do their masters’ work together and after working in bioengineering plants — Sehgal focused on flowering systems in plants and Pinto focused on roots — they both went into more digital fields — but maintained their fascination with plants and kept in touch with each other.
Professional work in medical diagnostics for Sehgal and lab instrumentation for Pinto kept both busy, but they continued their discussions around plant science and soil health.
Roughly three years ago, the two hit on the idea for a combined toolkit for water quality monitoring and soil health. Sehgal left the India Institutes of Technology, where she had been working, and joined Pinto in Copenhagen to begin developing the tech that would form the core of Nordetect’s business proposition.
The company’s technology consists of an analyzer and a cartridge, a microfluidic chip that users can insert into their water tank to take a sample. From the data that the device collects, farmers can control the nutrients they put into the water to optimize for traits like color and flavor, Pinto said.
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