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SK: Pure Harvest Smart Farms designs, constructs, and operates high-tech growing systems equipped with proprietary climate management technology to enable year-round production of local, affordable, premium-quality fresh fruits and vegetables in the world’s harshest climates. AFN: What makes Pure Harvest different from competing indoor farming players in the market? The funding complements sizable R&D incentives received from the Abu Dhabi Investment Office to fund and further develop pilots of new technologies, enhancements to our climate control systems, and product development of new tools, equipment, and sub-systems that will improve the efficiency of our production systems. additions to headcount, including key functions that further our capabilities, such as data science, machine learning, agronomists with specializations in new crops such as leafy greens and berries, and other high-skilled personnel. The two farms in the UAE are nearly complete and will harvest late-Q2, while the Saudi Arabian farm is to be completed by Q3 and harvesting in Q4.
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SK: This complements our earlier $29.3 million Series A capital to fund capital expenditures that will complete three new high-tech hybrid greenhouse projects, including two in the UAE and a beachhead in Saudi Arabia.
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Read on to hear more from Kurtz.ĪFN: Pure Harvest recently raised $60 million in growth funding.
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Sancta Capital made a “sizable” invesmtent in the round, the startup said at the time.ĪFN recently interviewed Pure Harvest founder and CEO Sky Kurtz about the company’s funding frenzy, its plans for expansion in the Middle East and beyond, and how it has managed to grow ‘green gold’ in the desert. In March this year, Pure Harvest announced that it had closed a $60 million growth funding round, including a $50 million sharia-compliant, structured sukuk financing led by SHUAA Capital and anchored by Franklin Templeton. Also in April 2020, nearby Kuwait invested $10 million in Pure Harvest to bring the company’s desert-customised smart farming solutions to its own shores. In April last year, the emirate’s Abu Dhabi Investment Office pumped $100 million of grant funding into startups including local controlled environment agriculture (CEA) grower Pure Harvest Smart Farms, with the startups sharing in a further $41 million injection last December. In 2019, the government of UAE constituent Abu Dhabi committed $272 million in financing and tax incentives to the development of a local agtech ecosystem. Pure Harvest “grows 26 commercial varieties of tomatoes, including six that have never before been seen,” according to CEO Sky Kurtz. While they’re short on arable land, something that the UAE and several of its neighbors do have in abundance is the money needed to invest in these technologies – or bring them in from overseas. But with the emergence and continued improvement of technologies in areas like indoor farming, irrigation, and water desalination, the region is beginning to contemplate a future in which it no longer relies as desperately on imports from more temperate, fecund climes. The story is the same across much of the arid Middle East. Just 5% of the country is considered cultivable.