About the Startup:

Vitæ is an agri-tech start up creating at home smart gardens to allow you to grow your fresh produce from home. The company was built on the premise that the nutritional value of food has dropped significantly with many of your favourite herbs, vegetables, and fruits travelling on average 21 days from the farm to your fridge. 21 days in which they lose on average 60% of their nutritional value. Vitæ allows you to grow your favourite herbs and spices from home

‍

Business Stage:

Pre-seed, seed.

‍

Management Team:

Arthur - background in management consultancy and growth hacking. Deals with business operations.

Isaac - background in policy, computation, and data processing. Product Operations lead.

Simon - freelancer with 25 years in supply chain management and product innovation.

Jennifer: freelance PR

‍

Problem and Opportunity:

Produce takes 21 days to get from farm to your fridge. 21 days during which your food loses on average 60% of its taste and nutritional value. farming is the second most polluting industry with transport emissions making up 50% of all of its emissions.

And this is why we created the Halo......a high-tech garden that allows you to grow fresh and organic food directly from your kitchen, no matter where you live, or what’s in season.

The Halo leverages the latest generation hydroponics technology, so that your food retains the nutritional value and tastes fabulous. And the harvesting yield is 10x more for the same amount of space used in traditional agriculture methods. Furthermore, the Halo utilises water instead of wasting it, saving on average 90%.

The hydroponics market was valued at 2.1 billion in 2022 and is estimated to have a 22.3% annual growth rate till 2025.

‍

What makes our startup unique?

Our product removes the use of soil from the product allowing for water table contamination to be avoided post use compared to competitors. We are the only smart garden company on the market to use bio-plastics. We also create our farms locally to remove transport emissions.

‍

Our go-to-market plan:

Through our interviews, we found out that people like our target customer Julia were a digital native and liked to shop online, yet sometimes liked to see products in the store before purchasing them. So we decided to follow a tripartite route, with the main focus on a Direct 2 Customer digital model, backed up by a traditional B2B2C route with both online and physical resellers.

‍

Traction & Milestones:

Raised 90k

Sold out pre-orders in May making 2.5k

Overfunded on Indiegogo in 48 hours.

7 product iterations, 4 MVPS, with a fully finalised MVP.

Incubated in Kings20

‍

Funding:

90,000 Euros

‍

Raising:

600,000€ Total Investment

Business Operations
75% | 450,000 €
- Manufacturing
- Supply Chain management
- Germination centres
- Phenotyping
- Delivery
- Saleries

Business Development
25% | 150,000 €
- E-commerce development
- Acquisition
- Advertising
- CPA
- Marketing