Greenhouse data sensor Agrilyst was named Battlefield winner of TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015. The startup took home the Disrupt Cup and $50,000.
From a thousand companies, only 25 were chosen to compete in the Startup Battlefield. These companies presented to the judges, who were an audience of various industry leaders. It took a grueling six hours for the judges to narrow the selection down to six finalists. Among them were Green Bits, Leap Financial, Preemadonna, Scrumpt and Stitch.
Agrilyst is a startup company that "helps greenhouse operators run their operations more efficiently by pulling in data from sensors in the greenhouse and information about crop yields and other metrics."
This idea came to CEO and co-founder Allison Kopf as she was employed at an urban greenhouse in New York City. With her background in physics, work in the agriculture industry was unexpected but much welcomed.
Her work enabled her to get up close and personal with the data aspect of the greenhouse business. Through this, she realized the need for quantitative data and integrated tools to aid operators. Many growers still use notebooks to record information such as plant yield. This information often fails to be integrated with data from greenhouse sensors.
She teamed up with co-founder and CTO Jason Camp and business development head Nick Kopf to form Agrilyst.
"The Agrilyst platform then aims to bring all of this data together. The service then displays all of this data in an easy-to-read dashboard that also includes harvest schedules," explained TechCrunch.
Inevitably, Allison received a number of questions as to whether Agrilyst is part of the developing marijuana industry. She explains it may be viable for the service but is not the company's primary market.
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