Cities have always grown food.We’re making it an industry.
City Farmers builds greenhouses and the operating system that runs them.
A lower-energy structure, precision growing, and agentic robotics.
Fresh food, grown on underused urban land, close to the people who eat it.
Field agriculture
Somebody pays for cheap produce
Crop farming kills workers at four and a half times the rate of American industry overall. 98B lb of fresh produce a year, grown where land is cheap and picked by hand. Pesticides turned up in 71 of the 74 streams the USGS sampled, and more than half carried enough to cross a federal limit for aquatic life.
Indoor Vertical farming
Replacing the sun is costly
Kalera listed on Nasdaq; its operating company filed for bankruptcy 279 days later and liquidated. Plenty filed in 2025. Bowery never reached a courtroom — it signed itself over to its creditors.
Stacking crops indoors under artificial light doesn’t scale unless energy is ~free.
Conventional greenhouses
The ones that work, barely do
Village Farms grew produce under 110 acres of glass and lost money on it three years running. In 2025 it sold the business and moved the glass to cannabis. Its filings say greenhouse costs run “generally higher” — energy, labor, infrastructure, technology.
The bottom line
Agriculture runs on labor it can’t afford
In the field it’s 71-hour weeks. In the greenhouse it’s 42% of production cost. Greenhouses grow more per square foot than a field ever will — and need a person for every step of it. In AppHarvest’s own filed projection, labor ran nearly twice the utility bill, and it later told the SEC that labor and productivity problems had cut its yields and its sales.
The last generation of indoor-agriculture companies raised venture capital and spent it on buildings. When the operations underperformed, the equity was already in the glass.
City Farmers designs, builds, and operates every facility while owning none of them — the way Marriott runs hotels it doesn’t own, each greenhouse is held by its own separately financed project company.2
The building
A box that repeats
A greenhouse scales like a distribution warehouse: one repeatable shell, from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of square feet. City Farmers pairs an aluminum frame and concrete pad with lower-cost reinforced greenhouse plastic — not glass or twin-wall polycarbonate — and standardizes the climate, growing, and robotics systems inside.
The network
Grown where it’s eaten
Commerce beat distance by moving warehouses closer to customers. Produce can work the same way — except the building doesn’t store the crop, it grows it.
City Farmers targets sites within 250 miles of its B2B customers. We operate each one end to end: cultivation, automation, food safety, maintenance, sales, and customer relationships.
The capital
Financed like the asset it is
Venture capital builds the operating company — not its real estate. Each greenhouse sits in a separately financed project company owned by future project vehicles or funds.
Our AI operating system runs three layers as one:
the envelope that holds the climate, the system that grows the crop,
and the robots that work it. One intelligence, seed to truck.
The envelope · SolaRoof
Dynamic bubble insulation
A double membrane whose cavity fills with soap bubbles on demand — insulation at night, shade in summer, clear when the crop wants light. Published studies independently measured 40–60% winter heating savings.
The growing system · Freya
Precision aeroponics
The Aeroframe structure provides 2-3x the canopy space of conventional tabletop systems. Ultrasonic nozzles mist roots without the pressure that clogs conventional aeroponics.
The control plane · City Farmers
Run all of it as one system
Agentic harnesses give local AI models the context, tools, permissions, and human oversight to run the envelope, the growing system, and the robots as a single loop — seed to truck.
The category is ours to define.
Energy can be engineered down. Labor can be automated. Land still costs what land costs.
That is why City Farmers separates the operating company from the greenhouses it runs:
venture capital backs the technology; project capital finances the buildings.
The two investments carry different risks, but reinforce each other as the network grows. Opportunity Zones offer a tax-advantaged path for putting eligible land across nearly 400 U.S. metropolitan areas to productive use. Congress made the program permanent in 2025, and the next map takes effect January 1, 2027.3
Venture capital
Buys the operating company
- The bet
- Design the crop architecture around the robot — not the robot around a system built for human hands. The A-frame delivers up to 7×1 strawberry yield vs conventional in the same footprint while presenting fruit in open, repeatable rows for machine vision and robotic reach. City Farmers builds the AI and robotics to harvest it.
- The risk
- The first commercial strawberry robot reached market in 2025, after eight years of development, and it picks about half as fast as a person — roughly 12.5 kilos an hour against 24 by hand. It wins on running around the clock, not on speed. No machine yet outpicks a person on a crop grown for hands.
- The return
- One company builds the AI operating system and robotics for the entire network. Each new crop, automated task, and operating site extends the same technology — and compounds the value of City Farmers.
Opportunity Zone capital
Buys the buildings
- The bet
- Turn eligible land into productive infrastructure: repeatable greenhouses generating cash flow from fresh food grown year-round, close to the customers they serve.
- The risk
- Greenhouses have historically produced thin margins.
- The return
- An investor who realizes an eligible capital gain can defer the tax by investing some or all of that gain in a Qualified Opportunity Fund. The fund invests through a project company that owns the greenhouses operated by City Farmers. After ten years, qualifying appreciation may be excluded from federal capital-gains tax, capped at the investment’s value in year thirty.3
- 01The greenhouses run
Leafy greens and herbs from day one, on the same operating system both investments start with.
- 02Cash flow and data
The cash helps fund the robotics. The operating data helps build them.
- 03Automation lands
Crops that needed human hands — strawberries, tomatoes — come within reach of a machine.
- 04More crops, more sites
New crops need new greenhouses, and the loop starts over larger than before.
At scale
Two paths to liquidity
City Farmers, Inc. pursues the public markets as the AI, robotics, and greenhouse operating company.
The stabilized Opportunity Zone holdings consolidate into a real estate investment trust, creating a separate path to liquidity for project investors.
Ian Wylie Hedrick
Founder, Chief Executive Officer
Leads City Farmers’ product and systems architecture, using AI-enabled engineering to build the software, data infrastructure, and agentic robotics behind the operating model. Previously founded an urban-farming program and managed institutional scale solar farm construction.
Pam Chuey
Fractional COO
Wharton MBA. Raised $25M for a sustainable-fuels startup, drove $125M in growth initiatives at Disney, and spent 18 years scaling businesses at Cisco.
Richard Nelson
Technology Advisor · SolaRoof Inventor
Inventor of SolaRoof with more than four decades of greenhouse research and six U.S. patents covering bubble insulation, shading, and related building systems.
Technology partner · Freya Cultivation Systems ↗
Founded in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 2018, Freya builds the crop-production layer inside a greenhouse: ultrasonic aeroponic irrigation, high-density Aeroframe systems, and the FreyaOS control suite.
Lukas Bartusevicius
CEO, Freya Cultivation Systems
Leads Freya’s commercial development, translating grower constraints into system configurations and carrying projects from discovery through delivery.
Marius Krutulis
Chief Agronomist, Freya Cultivation Systems
Ran a commercial greenhouse for more than a decade and supplied major retailers before joining Freya; now leads plant performance and aeroponics agronomy.
- Pilots
- Freya operates its own strawberry demonstrator near Kaunas. Its partner Boundless Haven Solutions has trialed Freya aeroponics in Djibouti and announced Aeroframe projects there and in Nairobi.
- Research partnerships
- Freya is co-developing precision irrigation for future orbital and lunar crop systems with the German Aerospace Center. Its hardware has also appeared in peer-reviewed university research.
- Backed by
- In December 2024, Freya raised €500,000 from Coinvest Capital, BSV Ventures, Sofigama, Zunami Oy, Paulius Vilemas, and Marko Lehtovaara to fund new pilots and a Kaunas demonstration greenhouse.
Disclosures
The 40–60% figure is independently measured winter heating-energy savings in published SolaRoof studies. The 2–7× yield range, including 7× for strawberries, comes from Freya supplier claims and pilot information. Neither is City Farmers operating performance.
City Farmers is pre-revenue. Facilities, cash flow, AI and robotics capabilities, network growth, financing, and investment outcomes described on this page are plans and targets, not operating results, commitments, or guarantees. Any IPO, REIT formation, consolidation, liquidity, or exit path is illustrative and depends on scale, market conditions, approvals, and legal and tax structuring.
Eligibility is not designation, and 2027 tracts remain subject to nomination and certification. City Farmers has not formed a Qualified Opportunity Fund or project company. Tax treatment depends on the investor, gain, fund, property, structure, compliance, and holding period. A 31-month working-capital safe harbor requires a qualifying written plan, schedule, and use of funds. Any REIT formation or consolidation of Opportunity Zone assets requires separate tax, securities, and REIT-qualification analysis. Final structures require legal and tax counsel. This page is not tax, legal, or investment advice or an offer to sell securities. See IRS program guidance and working-capital rules.