Eternal.ag Secures €8M to Revolutionize Greenhouse Automation with Simulation-First Robotics

In a bold move that could finally crack the elusive code of greenhouse automation, German agritech startup eternal.ag has secured €8 million in funding to deploy its simulation-first approach to autonomous harvesting. The Cologne-based company, founded by Renji John and Sherry Kunjachan in 2025, is taking on one of agriculture’s most stubborn challenges: building robots that can reliably harvest delicate produce in the chaotic, humid environment of commercial greenhouses.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. The greenhouse automation market has become something of a startup graveyard, littered with companies that could demonstrate working robots in controlled settings but failed spectacularly when faced with the messy reality of commercial farming. The problem isn’t trivial—harvesting tomatoes or cucumbers requires robots to navigate dense foliage, handle irregularly shaped fruit without bruising, and adapt to seasonal layout changes, all while operating in conditions that would make most electronics weep.

John knows this challenge intimately. He previously co-founded Honest AgTech, a Dutch startup building autonomous greenhouse robots that declared bankruptcy in July 2023 after running into liquidity shortages. Now he’s back with what he calls a fundamentally different approach: using NVIDIA Isaac Sim to build and validate robots in virtual greenhouses before ever touching real hardware.

This simulation-first methodology represents a potential paradigm shift in agricultural robotics. Rather than the traditional build-test-fail-repeat cycle that can take months and cost hundreds of thousands in damaged equipment and lost produce, eternal.ag claims it can compress iteration cycles from months to days. The company tests failure cases in software, where they’re cheap, before deploying in the real world, where they’re expensive.

The company’s first commercial product, Harvester, is an autonomous tomato harvesting robot designed to operate 22 hours a day as part of an AI-powered system that manages cut quality and produce consistency. The modular platform is intended to expand to other greenhouse tasks over time, with the ambitious goal of achieving fully autonomous greenhouse operations by 2040—requiring zero human operators.

The €8 million funding round, led by Simon Capital with participation from Oyster Bay Venture Capital, EquityPitcher Ventures, and Backbone Ventures, will accelerate product development and expand commercial deployments across Europe. The investor lineup is notably well-aligned with the sector’s needs: Oyster Bay is a Hamburg-based Food and AgTech fund managing over €100 million, while Simon Capital brings early-stage expertise from its portfolio including waterdrop and Just Spices.

The timing is crucial. European greenhouse growers have depended for decades on seasonal workers, predominantly from Eastern Europe, but that labor pool has been shrinking dramatically. The press release cites a 30% decline since 2010, though this figure hasn’t been independently confirmed. What’s undeniable is that greenhouses require consistent, year-round labor for physically demanding, repetitive tasks—exactly the kind of work that’s becoming increasingly difficult to fill.

“Greenhouse horticulture is one of the most efficient and sustainable ways to grow fresh produce year-round,” said Niklas Leske, Principal at Simon Capital. “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.”

The simulation-first approach isn’t just clever engineering—it’s a direct response to the failures of the past. Every decision, from the modular design to the step-by-step crop expansion strategy, reads as a deliberate effort to build more slowly and more carefully than before. The question that remains unanswered is whether this discipline will hold when faced with the commercial pressures that typically push startups to scale too quickly.

For John, this second attempt carries the weight of knowing exactly how the first one failed. The graveyard of greenhouse automation startups serves as both a warning and a challenge. If eternal.ag can deliver on its promises, it won’t just be building robots—it will be proving that the fundamental approach to agricultural automation needs to change.

The next few years will determine whether simulation-first development is the breakthrough the industry needs or just another clever idea that couldn’t survive contact with commercial reality. Either way, the €8 million investment suggests that at least some investors believe this time might be different.

Tags: #AgTech #Robotics #GreenhouseAutomation #AI #Simulation #AgriculturalInnovation #FoodTech #SustainableFarming #AutonomousSystems #EuropeanStartups #DeepTech #FutureOfFarming

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