Source.ag acquires London AI startup Optimal

Source.ag, the Amsterdam-based AI company for greenhouse growers, has acquired Optimal, the London startup that built an AI system to run a commercial greenhouse autonomously.

Founder and CEO Dave Hunter joins Source as VP of autonomous control, together with Optimal's engineering team.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

"Modern greenhouses are critical for supplying affordable vegetables under extreme weather and water scarcity," a news release state. "If food cannot be grown outdoors, it must be grown indoors. Another record summer of extreme heat, storms and volatile energy prices has sharpened the case. Today, greenhouses depend on a shrinking pool of skilled growers, which limits scalability. The missing piece has been AI that works in the messy physical world of agriculture. That is what Source and Optimal have built and now bring together.

"Optimal’s AI directly controls greenhouse heating, ventilation, screens, lighting, CO₂ and irrigation through the grower’s existing hardware," the release continues. "Its technology uses proprietary physics and machine learning models of the crop and the greenhouse to plan the growing environment days ahead and re-optimizes in real time as the weather changes. In a commercial-scale greenhouse in the Netherlands, the world’s reference point for greenhouse horticulture, it delivered 13 percent more yield with 27 percent less energy than the benchmark Dutch grower. It has since run commercial operations in the Netherlands and Canada."

Hunter is a former head of quantitative trading at Deutsche Bank and was a member of Oxford's Machine Learning group.

"In 2016, DeepMind used similar algorithms to ones he was researching to cut the energy Google's data centers spend on cooling by 40%," the release states. "If AI could run a data center, he reasoned, it could run a greenhouse. He founded Optimal that year through Entrepreneurs First. Its team comes from Oxford, Imperial College, Airbus and Red Bull Racing. Backers include Founders Fund, Backed VC, 2050 and Acequia Capital, plus angel investors Charlie Songhurst (Meta board member), Ed Grefenstette of Google DeepMind and Wendy Tan White of Intrinsic, the Alphabet robotics company.

"Source's software monitors the crop, forecasts the harvest weeks ahead and automates irrigation," the release continues. "Optimal adds control of the climate itself. Together they form a closed loop: one system that observes, predicts and acts. Source’s software already runs in more than 500 greenhouses in 25 countries. It supports €2.5 billion of tomato, pepper and cucumber production a year and works with 13 of the world's 25 largest high-tech growers. Source has raised €50 million from investors including Astanor Ventures, Acre Venture Partners, Enza Zaden and Harvest House."

"Everyone is talking about physical AI. With this deal, we are putting our money where our mouth is," said Rien Kamman, co-founder and CEO of Source.ag. "Optimal's AI has already improved yield and energy in real commercial greenhouses. Now it joins a platform that runs in more than 500 of them. We need many more greenhouses across the globe to secure access to healthy food for everyone. With the current technology stack, we do not have enough expert growers to run them all, but with AI, we can solve this scalability problem."

"A global shortage of skilled growers prevents new greenhouses from being built and leaves our food system exposed to extreme climate and energy events," said Hunter, the founder and CEO of Optimal. "We have proven that applied AI can overcome this scarcity by running greenhouses autonomously, enabling growers to increase productivity and expand. By joining Source, we can now accelerate the deployment of this AI into greenhouses across the world and create a more resilient food system for the future."

"As growers, we feel climate and labor pressure every season," added Kees van Veen, CEO of European greenhouse tomato producer Agro Care, which is a Source customer. "We do not need more hype. We need tools that keep the climate stable, energy in check and quality high across hundreds of hectares. Autonomous control is the logical next step, and we intend to be among the first to use it."

The first autonomous deployments at Source customers in Europe and North America go live this winter. Source then plans to extend its AI suite to more crops, growing methods and regions.