Pittsburgh robot farm business of future backed by Pritzker billions

Next to the last steel mill in the poor industrial town of Braddock along the Monongahela River just nine miles from Pittsburgh’s U.S. Steel Tower, a vertical farming business backed by billionaire Nicholas Pritzker’s Tao Capital is sprouting as an agritech innovator.

The start-up, founded in 2016 as RoBotany by MBA student Austin Webb and incubated at Carnegie Mellon University, is aiming to disrupt the $60 billion U.S. produce market. Now named the more consumer-friendly sounding Fifth Season, the emerging business is leveraging advanced technology, $75 million in venture capital, increased distribution, a planned new Columbus, Ohio, facility, and an expanded management team to score in the fast-growth vertical farming market. CEO Webb confidently projects Fifth Season could be a $15 million business in Pittsburgh within five years and $500 million through geographic expansion plans, and estimates sales will hit a double-digit revenue rate this year and a 600% revenue increase.   

“Our smart manufacturing facility improves the yield, taste and texture of the vegetables, and does that with 95% less water, 95% less land, and uses no pesticides or chemicals,” said Webb, who is 33. Fifth Season’s automated proprietary system grows fresh produce year-round indoors in vertical trays, relying on artificial intelligence, robotics and data to control light, water and nutrients, and harvest leafy greens.

Currently less than 1% of fresh produce is grown through hydroponics systems versus open-field agriculture, but this segment is forecast by Mordor Intelligence to grow by nearly 11% yearly to about $600 million by 2025. “There’s tremendous runway as the price comes down and more reliable operations remove the risk,” said Brian Holland, managing director of Cowen & Co. in New York.  “It’s a race to scale with potentially multiple winners who can prove the economic model for automatic, robotic growing,” he added. “Fifth Season is more advanced, if not the most advanced, in the market in marrying technology and robotics to grow vegetables indoors at a lower cost.”

Fifth Season is competing in a capital intensive, highly fragmented market with more than 2,000, mostly smaller farms and a handful of larger scale players. Among the largest is San Francisco-based Plenty Unlimited, which recently inked $400 million in strategic funding from Walmart and plans to sell its fresh produce from its Compton facility at the retailer’s California stores. Another major rival is AeroFarms in Newark, New Jersey, which scrapped a SPAC deal to go public in October 2021 and is continuing to build out capacity at a Danville, Virginia farm. 

“Market leadership is just a function of time and a function of…