Electric Plant Company
Category: AI in Agriculture
Plant intelligence company that uses low-cost sensors and Bombadil, a foundation AI model for plant electrophysiology, to read plant health from the plant's own electrical signals. Electric Plant Company was founded in 2023. The company is led by Justin Mast. Based in San Francisco, US. Team size: 2-10. Total funding raised: $11.2M. Latest round: Seed. Key investors include Onto Ventures, Climactic, Ponderosa, Endeavor Catalyst, Ludlow, Michigan Rise, The Fund, Schox VC, Dug Song.
- Founded
- 2023
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, US
- Team size
- 2-10
- Total funding
- $11.2M
Value proposition
It reads a plant's physiological state from inside the plant, using its electrical signals, rather than inferring it from soil, weather or visual inspection. Growers get real-time, low-cost visibility into water stress, nutrient needs and other stresses. The company claims this can cut water use by 20% or more and raise yields.
Products and solutions
Bud: a low-cost probe (tens of dollars) that screws into the cambium and streams microvolt signals over a low-power wireless network. Bombadil: a self-supervised foundation model for plant electrophysiology, pretrained on more than 4M hours of recordings from over 1,400 plants across 100+ species. It estimates seven stress markers, including PSII efficiency, leaf-air temperature and CWSI. Insight Layer: dashboards, alerts and agents. On-site deployment and calibration services.
Unique value
The first cross-species foundation model for plant electrical signals. It generalizes to species it never saw in training, and runs on sensors costing tens of dollars, versus thousands for existing tools. Only a couple of sensors are needed per acre.
Target customer
Commercial growers, orchards and tree-crop operators, plantation and forestry managers, landscapers and interior-scapers, consumer plant-care businesses, researchers, carbon accounting and risk-management firms
Industries served
Agriculture (orchards, tree crops, greenhouses), forestry and plantations, urban landscaping and city-scaping, consumer plant care, plant science research, carbon accounting, wildfire risk, water quality monitoring
Technology advantage
Its proprietary data corpus has grown to about 7M hours of plant electrophysiology recordings, which the company says is more than all public human brain-activity recordings combined. It owns the full stack, from hardware to model to insights. New tasks attach as readouts on one core model. It licenses technology to existing plant-care operators rather than competing with them.
How they differentiate
Vivent builds per-crop electrophysiology diagnostics. Electric Plant instead offers a single species-agnostic foundation model trained on 100+ species, paired with much cheaper sensors. Unlike InnerPlant, it requires no genetic modification of the plants.
Main competitors
Vivent Biosignals (PhytlSigns, Switzerland), InnerPlant (engineered signaling plants, US), conventional soil-probe and satellite crop-monitoring providers
Key partnerships
University of Michigan Taubman College (public talk/event), early 'founding operator' commercial deployments (names undisclosed)
Major milestones
2023: founded. 2025: public launch of the 'Planetary Gardeners' vision. Oct 2026: emerged from stealth with an $11.2M seed round and released the Bombadil foundation model and whitepaper.
Growth metrics
Data corpus of about 7M hours, up from 4M at the first training run. Coverage of 1,400+ plants across 100+ species, with about 125 species interpretable per TechCrunch. Hundreds of sensors deployed at commercial sites.
Market positioning
Early-stage deep-tech positioned as the 'foundation model for plants' and as a biosignal AI platform, licensing to plant-care operators and expanding crop by crop
Geographic focus
United States (San Francisco HQ, Michigan ties); global ambitions across agriculture and forestry
Patents and IP
Bombadil technical whitepaper published 2026-10-19 (Kirk, Bednarski, Twardy, Mast, von Kraus); no patents publicly verified
About Justin Mast
Founder & ex-CEO of Bloomscape (online plant retailer; Founder & Board Director, ~6 years); second-time founder
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Official website: https://www.electricplant.co