OnePointOne's Journey to AutoStore

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My brother John and I started OnePointOne (OPO) in 2017 after a year of research and pitching.

We were galvanized by the state of global micronutrient malnourishment, a problem that continues to worsen today. Early on, a group of Stanford Professors invested $10,000 in our first round of funding. Since then, we’ve raised $77 million, and spent five years developing a completely unique, patent-protected, aeroponic vertical farm.

When we built our first commercial farm, we met AutoStore. While OPO had developed a dozen autonomous fleet robots, AutoStore already had 60,000 of their own robots in the market.

 After a year of conversations, OPO & AutoStore decided to team up and build the first Farm.

At 8 feet tall [approx. 2.44m] “The Demo” had one job: to prove that an AutoStore could grow plants. After validating yield and quality, we tore down The Demo to build the “MVP”. At 20 feet tall [approx. 6.09m], the MVP demonstrated that an AutoStore could grow plants at exceptional yield and quality.

Today, the Farm is oversubscribed, supplying all 10 Arizona-based Whole Foods stores, farmers markets, and a national food distributor. OPO is in the process of expanding the Phoenix Farm to meet growing demand from local grocery retailers and food distributors.

In a single room, OPO produces five leafy greens, seven microgreens, and basil. The reliability of the Farm’s subsystems creates a stable environment for yield and quality. Chief among them; the AutoStore.

From OPO’s inception, the indoor farming industry warned us that “footsteps are one of the highest costs in a farm.” In other words, if people have to walk the farm to plant, inspect, or harvest, the economics become difficult to solve. Rather than moving people to plants, we decided to move plants to people. Today, automated plant movement is table stakes, and AutoStore is OPO’s partner in solving that challenge.

Every day, our robots “Novak” and “Fred” run across the top of the Farm, moving plants. Sometimes they’re planting. Sometimes they’re relocating plants from germination to production. Sometimes they’re bringing plants out for harvest. In every case, Novak and Fred execute seamlessly. Their reliability is the foundation of a reliable farming system.

Three additional factors differentiate OPO from competitors: price, redundancy, and density. AutoStore delivers an automated indoor logistics solution with an unmatched cost-to-performance ratio. As one AutoStore colleague put it: “AutoStore has spent 20 years simplifying while others have spent 20 years complicating.” This simplicity drives lower CapEx, lower maintenance, ease of installation, and built-in redundancy. In the rare event of robot failure, the remaining robots immediately adapt to complete the task. With no single point of failure, operations continue even through difficult issues.

Finally, AutoStore’s storage density is unmatched. Early on, density was a challenge due to plants’ eating, drinking, and breathing requirements. Together, the teams at OnePointOne and AutoStore solved these problems comprehensively, and today we exceed yield and quality targets week after week.

The last eight years have been long, arduous, and often painful. Still, it has been a worthy journey in pursuit of global nourishment. We deeply appreciate the patience and collaboration AutoStore has shown OnePointOne, and we intend to reward that partnership with a global network of AutoStore-powered farms feeding humanity.

About OnePointOne

OnePointOne is on a mission to revolutionize the way we feed the world by providing innovative indoor farming technology to a range of industries. To lean more about Opollo™, the world's most advanced plant production system, please visit onepointone.com.