When it comes to commercial farming in the MENA region, the months of hot weather here often pose a challenge to commercial farmers wanting to set up shop here. A remedy to this problem is the concept of hydroponic farming, which grows plants without artificial elements in soil-less or aquatic-based environments, using only mineral nutrient solutions, which means crops are no longer reliant on climate or season.
Pure Harvest founder and CEO Sky Kurtz and his team are now aiming to bring this farming model to the Middle East, starting with the UAE. Kurtz is joined by co-founder, local partner and Director Mahmoud Adi, with both having extensive experience as private equity and venture capital investment professionals in New York, Silicon Valley and Abu Dhabi. Seeing as what Kurtz asserts as the “regional vulnerabilities” with water scarcity and dependence on food import from other countries is what imbued the team to launch Pure Harvest. They recognized an opportunity to leverage commercially proven controlled environment agriculture (CEA) tech for the GCC, and were driven to pioneer a resource to “overcome local climate challenges (specifically, heat and humidity during the summer months) to deliver European- standard fresh produce to customers.”
The Pure Harvest team has an ambitious goal: “We are striving to transform the agriculture sector in the region, resulting in increased availability and affordability of high-quality fresh produce, while delivering a tangible food and water security solution and environmental sustainability, [such as] reduced food waste, water consumption, carbon emissions via both commercial airfreight and desalination, etc.”
Quite a target- and what do people think? Kurtz says feedback is both excitement and disbelief. While it took a bit of convincing to customers that the concept will work and that it’s been done successfully in similar warm regions including Arizona, Texas, Mexico, Australia and the south of France, they also feel that people are rooting for them. There is an excitement of having a large-scale social impact in the region, possibly resulting to availability and affordability of healthy food, food security, water conservation and environmental impact, among others. To its credit, this support and belief on the startup’s capability can be seen in its recent pre-seed angel investment round of US$1.1 million from Abu Dhabi-based Shorooq Investments.
It comes at an opportune time- they started to seek funding as they have secured customers and an interim grower/COO, and completed their feasibility study. Using their investment background and acumen, Kurtz and Adi delivered everything from studies on the tech, climate, value chain, cost structure, resource consumption, to landed cost of imports, scalability, etc.- anything that they themselves would want to know to invest in a startup. “We wouldn’t spend a dime of our investors’ money if we wouldn’t invest our own. We have ‘put our money where our mouth is,’ having invested over $1 million at a very early stage, which we hope will provide comfort to our investors.”
Taking around three months to close their pre-seed funding, the capital has been used to acquire a 3.3 hectare farm site…