October brought signs of life to the decimated indoor ag sector. Two new indoor farms opened, specialty crop funding continued and the listed sector reported new bookings for indoor farm equipment. Over on our Insights platform, we added several new farm listings, two of which were just opened over the summer.

Funding in October Centers on India

This month, we saw just one funding, and it was in specialty crops in India. It was in this year’s trendiest crop, strawberries.

Fragaria Fruits Raises $2M: India’s Premium Strawberry Play

Chennai-based Fragaria Fruits closed a $2 million seed round in July, announced across Indian media outlets in October, led by WEH Ventures with participation from Rainmatter (Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath’s investment arm), Spiral Ventures, Perpetual Capital, and Sashi Kumar, CEO of organic dairy company Akshayakalpa. Founded in 2024 by an international team—Harish Varadharajan (India), Timothy van Niekerk (South Africa), and Damian Lopez-Salazar (Mexico)—Fragaria completed a pilot facility in Chennai before securing institutional backing. The company is now scaling from pilot production to a 120-150 kg daily facility in Bangalore, with plans to expand beyond strawberries into blueberries and raspberries. The raise positions Fragaria within strawberries’ continuing momentum as indoor agriculture’s most bankable crop category—a pattern established by Oishii’s $150 million round in November 2024.

WEH Ventures describes Fragaria as addressing “a major supply chain inefficiency in India’s fruit industry” through climate-resilient, tech-enabled farming. Rainmatter’s participation is particularly notable: the Zerodha-backed fund operates as patient capital with no board seats or exit clauses, reflecting a megatrend thesis around climate and health. For India’s nascent premium berry market, where imports face cold chain challenges and price sensitivity, local year-round production through CEA represents a genuine supply gap.

New Farms Open in October

This month, the industry saw a couple of new farm openings, and one new closure..

Little Leaf Farms Expands to Fourth Greenhouse

Pennsylvania-based Little Leaf Farms opened its fourth greenhouse at the McAdoo campus in October, expanding its operations to 40 acres total. The facility will support distribution of Romaine Leaf lettuce, which has doubled in national distribution since its July launch and is now available in more than 8,000 grocery stores across the Southeast, Midwest, and Canada. Little Leaf Farms, which grows packaged lettuce using controlled environment agriculture, continues to expand its footprint as one of the leading CEA produce brands in the market. The company recently announced a new campus in Manchester, Tennessee, anticipated to become fully operational in Fall 2026 to supply the Midwest, Southeast, and Texas markets with fresh leafy greens grown using captured rainwater, natural sunlight, and solar-powered energy.

A Singapore Farm Pivots to Food Production

Singapore-based V-Plus Agritech completed an urban farm in collaboration with Abuzz Landscape, transforming an existing pond into an aquaponics system that merges landscaping with food production. The facility uses LED lighting to supplement natural sunlight in areas shaded by nearby buildings, ensuring consistent growth for hyper-local vegetables while maintaining ecological balance. The project incorporates biodiversity elements including fish species, crayfish, and terrapins throughout the streams, alongside tropical plants that enrich the ecosystem. Beyond food production, the space serves as a hub for outdoor learning and community activities, supporting STEM education, “long kang” fishing, and farm-to-table harvesting events, with new sheltered areas designed to provide comfortable spaces for teachers and students to rest and connect.

Surrey Study Questions Vertical Farming’s Climate Benefits—But With Caveats

A University of Surrey study published in Food and Energy Security found that the vertical farm it examined had a carbon footprint exceeding traditional lettuce production despite delivering 20-fold higher yields and eight-fold water savings compared to field farming. Lead researcher Michael Gargaro’s life cycle assessment revealed that vertically farmed lettuce generated 0.93 kg of greenhouse gases per kilogram produced versus 0.57 kg for UK field-grown lettuce, even when powered by renewable electricity.

However, the study’s most significant finding concerns input materials rather than energy: the farm studied used jute fiber plugs for seed germination, which accounted for 94-96% of the operation’s land use impact because jute cultivation requires dedicated agricultural land in tropical regions. “Land footprint” measures the total agricultural land required to produce all inputs for growing food. For vertical farms, this unexpectedly includes land needed to cultivate the crops that become jute plugs, not just the physical space occupied by the farm itself. Energy demands comprised nearly 40% of climate impact. Researchers noted that switching to coconut coir—a byproduct of coconut processing requiring no additional farmland—could theoretically eliminate the jute-driven land footprint problem.

This caveat is significant: many vertical farms use alternative propagation methods or coconut coir already, meaning the land footprint issue may not apply industry-wide. The study was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), UK government agencies supporting academic research in science and engineering.

Eden Green Shutters

Texas-based Eden Green Technology filed a WARN notice on October 15, announcing it would permanently close its Cleburne facilities on December 13, laying off over 100 employees across all levels from executives to greenhouse staff. The hybrid vertical farm operation, strategically located adjacent to a Walmart distribution center supplying 400+ stores, had grown millions of pounds of produce since opening its first commercial greenhouse in 2022. The closure—attributed to constrained access to capital and inability to secure continued investment—came just two years after the company announced a $40 million Phase 2 expansion intended to triple production capacity and create 100 jobs in the Dallas-Fort Worth region.

Better Indoor Ag Results in theListed Sector

Four of the listed companies that we track announced quarterly results in October. They reported falls against the prior year in each case:

Source: Company Reports

While headline sales figures declined across listed indoor agriculture companies in Q3 2025, a closer look reveals the sector’s greenhouse and CEA-related businesses are actually outperforming their parent companies’ other divisions. Signify, the Dutch lighting giant, saw overall Q3 sales slip 8.4% to €1.4 billion. Yet, the company’s results release noted “strong agricultural lighting performance” offsetting weakness in conventional and OEM lighting—with the Professional segment maintaining a robust 10.4% margin despite headwinds elsewhere.

Gibraltar Industries’ Agtech division posted 38.8% growth to $57.6 million, with bookings surging 121% year-to-date and backlog up 110%. This was driven by the company’s expanding customer base that secured business with 15 new CEA growers and 24 commercial classic growers. Sweden’s Heliospectra faced the steepest decline—sales down 46.7% to SEK 7.6 million—primarily due to seasonal timing as the 2024 greenhouse season concluded. The company also experienced longer project decision cycles driven by uncertainty around import duties and tariffs (Heliospectra report). Positively, order intake climbed 27% year-over-year to SEK 4.7 million.

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Featured image courtesy of Unsplash.

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