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Greenhouses are becoming an essential part of securing the global supply of fresh fruit and vegetables. They offer a more resilient and controlled alternative to traditional outdoor farming, helping growers manage climate change, land constraints and pests while enabling year-round production.
However, the greenhouse industry faces a growing structural challenge: labor shortages. Across Europe, greenhouse labor availability has fallen significantly over the past decade — in some regions by as much as 30% since 2010 — and the trend is expected to continue. Without reliable staffing, growers struggle to maintain consistent harvesting operations.
To address this challenge, eternal.ag, a startup building autonomous harvesting robots for greenhouses, has raised €8 million in funding from Simon Capital, Oyster Bay Venture Capital, EquityPitcher Ventures, and Backbone Ventures.
Automating greenhouse harvesting
Eternal.ag is developing fully autonomous robots capable of performing greenhouse crop work without human operators. By automating physically demanding harvesting tasks, the company aims to help growers maintain consistent operations even when labor availability is unpredictable.
The company’s first commercial product, Harvester, is an autonomous robot designed specifically for tomato greenhouses. The robot can operate up to 22 hours per day and is integrated into an AI-powered system that ensures both the quality of the harvest and precise cutting of the fruit.
Designed as a modular platform, Harvester is intended to evolve over time with additional robotic capabilities, enabling broader automation across greenhouse operations.
"Autonomous robots only work if they can handle real-world variability between plants, layouts, and daily operations. We develop and validate our robots using simulation-first development. That allows us to train, test, and fail safely in virtual greenhouses — cutting iteration cycles from months to days.”
Once deployed, every robot continuously feeds operational data back into the system, allowing the technology to improve and scale over time.
A global team tackling a global problem
Founded by Renji John and Sherry Kunjachan, eternal.ag currently employs 26 team members across Europe and India. The company is headquartered in Cologne, with additional operations in Bengaluru.
The newly raised funding will be used to:
⭐ accelerate product development
⭐ expand commercial deployments across Europe
⭐ extend the technology to additional crop types
Looking ahead, eternal.ag envisions a future where greenhouses operate fully autonomously, powered by robotics and AI.
By 2040, the company aims to enable greenhouse operations that require no manual harvesting work, helping growers maintain stable production in an increasingly uncertain agricultural landscape.
