German agritech eternal.ag raises 8M

"The gap between "works in the lab" and "works reliably at 22 hours a day in a real grower's greenhouse" has proved extremely difficult to close. Several companies have shipped robots that work in controlled demos and then fail at commercial scale."

"The key technical distinction John is making this time is the development methodology. Eternal.ag uses simulation-first development, building and validating robots inside virtual greenhouses powered by NVIDIA Isaac Sim before deploying hardware in real ones."

"The claim is that this compresses iteration cycles from months to days, allowing the company to test failure cases cheaply in software rather than expensively in steel and tomatoes."

Greenhouse automation has seen numerous startup failures despite promising demos, with the core challenge being reliable harvesting of delicate, irregular fruit in complex, variable environments at commercial scale. Renji John, whose previous venture Honest AgTech failed in 2023, co-founded eternal.ag to tackle this problem differently. The startup raised €8 million and employs simulation-first development using NVIDIA Isaac Sim to build and validate robots in virtual greenhouses before physical deployment. This methodology compresses iteration cycles from months to days, enabling cost-effective testing of failure scenarios in software rather than expensive real-world trials. Deployed robots continuously feed operational data back into the system for ongoing improvement.

Read at TNW | Sustainability