A plant’s surroundings can tell us a lot. Soil moisture, weather, and satellite images help growers decide when to intervene. But they do not directly tell us how the plant itself is responding.
Electric Plant Company is building a way to close that gap. Today, the company is emerging from stealth with $11.2M in seed funding and introducing Bombadil, its foundation AI model for plant electrical signals.
The system starts with Bud, a low-cost sensor that attaches directly to a plant and records electrical activity in its tissue. Bombadil interprets that stream of data to estimate seven physiological stress markers, including measures of water stress and photosynthetic efficiency. Rather than waiting for a visible change, growers gain another way to understand what is happening inside the plant.
The team pretrained Bombadil on more than 4 million hours of recordings from over 1,400 plants across 100 species. Its dataset has since grown to 7 million hours. A key capability is applying what it learns across species, including plants it did not encounter during pretraining. That matters because a tool that needs to be rebuilt for every crop would be much harder to put to work broadly.
Co-founders Justin Mast and Lee von Kraus bring complementary experience to that challenge. Justin previously founded Bloomscape, while Lee is a neuroscientist and co-founder of Halo Neuroscience. Together, they are combining plant care experience with expertise in biological signals.
The technology is already being deployed at commercial sites, with hundreds of sensors in the field. Electric Plant licenses its technology to existing plant care operators, giving them a new source of insight rather than asking them to replace their businesses or expertise.
For us, the opportunity is to make an overlooked source of biological data useful. Better visibility into plant health could help growers make more informed decisions about water, care, and intervention. We’re proud to back Justin, Lee, and the team as they bring that capability to more plants and more operators.
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