Where robotics and AI meet greenhouse growing

Aside from perhaps some chatter or music playing, generally greenhouses can be more muted spaces for growing. However, when you've got robots running them? They're even quieter, as evidenced with a peek inside Hippo Harvest's robotics and machine learning-powered greenhouses in Pescadero, California. There, "tractors" or robots quietly pass by with an elevated plate of leafy greens while other robots hum by, sensing moisture levels and completing their other designated tasks.

It's this unique setting that attracted the interest of Cox Farms, who in July, announced the close of a $30 million Series C funding round. That investment opened the door to a big 2027 for Hippo Harvest which includes the start of a 30-acre expansion at a new Hollister, California facility to add to its growing capacity from its one acre today, and accelerate the commercialization of indoor-grown spinach. While the site has capacity for 30-acres of greenhouses, the company will build in stages, starting in late 2027.

© Hippo Harvest

The company's AMR tractor in the greenhouse.

As far as automation in greenhouses, this isn't a new notion–in fact, this sector of the produce industry sees a considerable amount of automation. "If you look at the European systems being deployed, there are a lot of good, commercially productive systems," says Eitan Marder-Eppstein, CEO and co-founder of Hippo Harvest. They have a technology platform that's becoming a bit more standardized across the industry and they're becoming excellent operators of that platform."

For Marder-Eppstein and his business partner Wim Meeussen, they had plans of approaching automation differently and that started seven years ago. For the first two years, the partners volunteered in a greenhouse doing manual labor tasks such as washing rafts. There they observed and planned a greenhouse where data would be collected to apply to robotics fully serving the greenhouse. It was also when they came up with the company name–a nod to the children's book, Hippos Go Berserk by Sandra Boynton, a favorite of one of Marder-Eppstein's young daughters at the time. "Hippos also eat a massive amount of leafy greens so the idea was that we were going to make a harvest fit for a hippo," he says.

A precedent in logistics

Today, the company's model is a proprietary robotic growing system that uses Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) and machine learning to monitor, tend and harvest plants with precision at every stage of growth. Robotic 'tractors' automatically respace growing modules throughout the growth cycle, maximizing space efficiency and yields at the farm level. "What we're doing is going through a similar transition to what the warehouse and logistics space went through over the last 15-20 years. If you'd walked into a logistics warehouse at that time, you'd see a lot of process automation–so gantries and conveyors and pneumatic systems," says Marder-Eppstein.

© Hippo Harvest

L: Marder-Eppstein with the company's mascot last month at IFPA's GPFS 2026 show. R: the company's butter lettuce product.

Increasingly, those logistics spaces have been run by robotics where fixed conveyance was replaced with machines moving shelves around for example. "We saw an opportunity to take that technology from the warehouse and logistics space and apply it in greenhouses, where instead of all of the process automation, robots would be turned into tractors and do a lot of different activities around the farm. They harvest the crop, they provide water to the crop, they take sensor data, etc. That allowed us to have more flexibility than the systems that are out there today and it also allowed us to collect data in a different way for some of the artificial intelligence work that we do."

What's also different is the scale at which Hippo is doing this. "At the beginning, people rightfully wondered: is this going to work? They were right–in trials, the plants would be stressed or die if we didn't get the right fertilizer recipe to the plant," says Marder-Eppstein. "However we'd built a phenomenal trials platform and we could do many, many trials of different fertilizer treatments and then we measured how well the plant was growing. Over time, you could see what worked better and plot an optimization curve and now we have a commercially productive system."

The technology is largely only used in the greenhouse space itself. Once the product is cut and into the packing house, packing looks fairly similar to packing for any leafy greens producer.

© Hippo Harvest

A look inside the greenhouse.

The thing about spinach…

Uniquely, Hippo's base product is spinach–an item that's finicky in how it reacts to its growing environment. It's also very susceptible to the waterborne pathogen Pythium or "water mold." "If you get that in a recirculating hydroponic system, it can be detrimental. It gets into the water and takes everything out so it's a very risky and challenging crop to grow in hydroponics," says Marder-Eppstein. "Because we have a non-recirculating hydroponic system, we're delivering the exact amount of water and fertilizer with the robots so the water never comes back. It's isolated to that tray so we have very high resistance to waterborne pathogens."

This nonrecirculating mode also makes organic production more attractive. In the U.S., there is organic certification as a hydroponic greenhouse, but those require the use of organic fertilizers. "When you use those, there are solids and sediments that can clog these drip emitters in the mobile gutter systems so management becomes a bit challenging. In our systems, we don't have any plumbing so that gives us an advantage with organic fertilizers as well. It's just the surface area we have to clean," he says.

On top of spinach production, this year the company also launched a Butter lettuce product in early 2026. That was brought to market fairly quickly, within six to eight weeks following a retailer request, and the two now anchor a growing line of indoor-grown greens built for year-round consistency.

© Hippo Harvest

Another look at a tractor.

So now the company is working on showing that the non-recirculating method of hydroponics, with robotic management, can be a good idea and a good business. "The goal is to show that this works at the scale required to have real impact in the industry," says Marder-Eppstein.

This means that 2027 is already looking to be a busy year for Hippo Harvest. It's first finishing its retrofit at its current facility with its latest systems which are the mobile gutter approach via the robotics–a project should conclude in the next few months. "Then, in the back half of next year, the goal is to start building better expansion sites," says Marder-Eppstein. "Ultimately, we have a platform that we feel good about. We have partnerships that we feel good about. Now it's about showing that as we replicate that and grow it."

For more information:

Eitan Marder-Eppstein

Hippo Harvest

[email protected]

https://www.hippoharvest.com/