Eternal.ag Secures €8M to Deploy AI Robots That Automate Greenhouse Harvesting

Eternal.ag, a Cologne-based startup pioneering fully autonomous harvesting robotics for controlled-environment agriculture, has secured €8 million in fresh funding. The round was led by Simon Capital, with participation from Oyster Bay Venture Capital, EquityPitcher Ventures, and Backbone Ventures.

The company is engineering a new generation of autonomous robotic systems purpose-built to execute greenhouse crop operations entirely without human intervention — a proposition that is rapidly moving from ambition to commercial reality.

Controlled-environment agriculture, particularly greenhouse cultivation, has emerged as a critical pillar of modern food security. Unlike open-field farming, greenhouse operations offer meaningful insulation from seasonal volatility, shifting climate patterns, land constraints, and pest pressures — making year-round production of fresh fruit and vegetables increasingly viable at scale. Yet the sector faces a deepening structural challenge: the agricultural workforce that sustains these facilities is shrinking at an accelerating pace. Across Europe, labour availability in this segment has declined by as much as 30 per cent since 2010, and industry projections suggest the trajectory will worsen, leaving growers exposed to persistent and worsening staffing deficits.

Eternal.ag's robotic platform directly addresses this operational vulnerability. By mechanising the most physically demanding elements of the harvesting workflow, the company's systems allow greenhouse operations to run reliably and continuously — decoupled from the unpredictability of manual labour supply. Looking further ahead, the company has set its sights on an ambitious long-term milestone: fully automated greenhouse operations by 2040, with robotics eliminating the dependency on manual processes entirely.

The company's first commercial offering, Harvester, is a fully autonomous robot engineered specifically for tomato greenhouse environments. Designed for maximum operational uptime, Harvester runs up to 22 hours per day and is integrated into an AI-driven system that governs produce quality assessment and precision cutting in tandem. The result is a solution that combines high-throughput performance with the consistency that commercial growers require.

Underpinning the platform's long-term commercial appeal is its modular architecture. Rather than a fixed-function machine, Harvester is conceived as the first component in an extensible robotic ecosystem — one designed to incorporate additional functional modules over time, progressively broadening its utility across the full spectrum of greenhouse operations.

"Autonomous robots only work if they can handle real-world variability between plants, layouts, and daily operations," said Renji John, CEO and co-founder of Eternal.ag.

"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 action feeds data back into the system, which is designed to learn, improve and scale."

The simulation-first methodology is particularly significant from an engineering standpoint. By constructing high-fidelity virtual greenhouse environments, the team can stress-test robotic behaviour across a vast range of scenarios — plant morphology variation, layout configurations, ambient conditions — before a single physical deployment. This approach dramatically compresses the development feedback loop and reduces the cost of iteration, a key competitive advantage in hardware-intensive robotics development. Critically, the continuous data pipeline from deployed units back into the system creates a compounding learning effect, enabling performance to improve organically at scale.

"Climate change, labour shortages, and rising demand are pushing food production to its limits," said Niklas Leske, Principal at Simon Capital.

"Greenhouse horticulture is one of the most efficient and sustainable ways to grow fresh produce year-round. Yet, labour shortages put the industry at risk, and robotics is the only future-proof solution to build a decentralised, resilient food supply chain for the next generation. Eternal.ag's experienced team has a deep understanding of what growers are up against and has developed a solution to tackle this in a sustainable and measured way."

Eternal.ag was co-founded by Renji John and Sherry Kunjachan, and has grown to a team of 26 professionals distributed across Europe and India. The company operates from its headquarters in Cologne, complemented by an engineering office in Bengaluru — a dual-hub structure that reflects both its commercial focus in European horticulture markets and its access to deep technical talent.

The €8 million in new capital will be deployed across three strategic priorities: accelerating core product development, scaling commercial deployments with greenhouse operators across Europe, and extending the platform's capabilities to support a broader range of crop types beyond tomatoes.