NEW YORK, NY – Bowery has been named to the inaugural XB100, the definitive ranking of the top 100 private deep tech companies, published by XPRIZE and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Bowery, the largest U.S. vertical farming company serving over 1,800 grocery stores and major e-commerce platforms, is growing food wherever it is needed. Bowery has demonstrated product-category leadership with the continued broadening of its innovative, pesticide-free portfolio including high-demand items like salad kits. The company increased their retail footprint by over 15x between 2020 and 2023, all while growing more with less. Bowery’s farms are powered by 100% renewable energy.
“At Bowery, we are developing technology to reinvent a fresh food supply chain that is shorter, safer, provides more surety of supply, and is more sustainable,” said Irving Fain, Founder and CEO, Bowery. “Agriculture is one of the oldest and largest industries in the world and the second largest contributor to GHG emissions globally. There is no path to net zero that doesn’t lead through reinventing Food and Agriculture. This is a necessity to feed our growing population in an increasingly uncertain world, and I’ve never been more optimistic about what’s ahead.”
The XB100 was launched to celebrate the entrepreneurs who are commercializing scientific research into deep tech and spotlight how they are impacting our society across nine categories. The XB100 evaluation process involved ranking companies across four factors: impact on humanity, valuation, scientific difficulty, and commercial traction. For impact on humanity, XB100 enlists the help of a judging panel of scientists and industry experts who assist in the evaluation.
“The companies on the XB100 list represent the most valuable and impactful private companies in the deep tech sector,” said Tess Hatch, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “The XB100 awardees defy imagination and will reshape the human experience.”
“Investments in the commercialization of scientific research propel humanity forward,” said David Cowan, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “After years of investing in deep technologies ranging from quantum computing to rocket technology to next-generation biotherapeutics, Bessemer has marveled at the potential of XB100 companies to tackle profound problems facing our species and our planet.”
“We’re honored to recognize the innovators featured on the inaugural XB100 and their important impacts on society,” said Anousheh Ansari, CEO of XPRIZE. “As we work to empower problem-solvers around the world to address humanity’s greatest challenges, XPRIZE celebrates these great minds and our collective impact.”
The XB100 list is published online at https://www.bvp.com/xb100.
About Bowery
Bowery, the largest vertical farming company in the United States, designs and builds smart indoor environments to reimagine the future of food. Through its network of smart indoor farms and proprietary end-to-end technology, Bowery is transforming the entire fresh food supply chain to be smarter, safer, and more sustainable. Bowery’s farms are 100x+ more productive than traditional agriculture while using a fraction of the resources – all enabled by leading-edge technology.
Bowery is scaling quickly with five farms in operation, including a state-of-the-art R&D and innovation farms for pioneering indoor Agriculture Science, and two commercial farms under development that will more than double the company’s total production. Bowery’s brand has been in the market since 2016 and is currently sold in over 1,800 locations including Whole Foods, Ahold Delhaize, Amazon, Safeway/Albertsons, and Walmart.
Bowery is backed by tech and agriculture industry leaders with $647M in equity and debt raised from investors including Fidelity, Temasek, Google Ventures, KKR, General Catalyst, GGV Capital, First Round Capital, and individuals including Jeff Wilke, Tom Colicchio, José Andrés, and David Barber of Blue Hill.
Bessemer Venture Partners
Bessemer Venture Partners helps entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to build and forge long-standing companies. With more than 145 IPOs and 300 portfolio companies in the enterprise, consumer and healthcare spaces, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from their early days through every stage of growth. Bessemer’s global portfolio has included Pinterest, Shopify, Twilio, Yelp, LinkedIn, PagerDuty, DocuSign, Wix, Fiverr, and Toast and has $20 billion of assets under management. Bessemer has teams of investors and partners located in Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York, London, Hong Kong, Boston, and Bangalore. Born from innovations in steel more than a century ago, Bessemer’s storied history has afforded its partners the opportunity to celebrate and scrutinize its best investment decisions (see Memos) and also learn from its mistakes (see Anti-Portfolio).
XPRIZE
XPRIZE is a global future-positive movement delivering truly radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. XPRIZE inspires and empowers a global community of problem-solvers to positively impact our world by crowdsourcing solutions through large-scale competitions, tackling the world’s grandest challenges in exploration, environment, and human equity. Donate, learn more or join a team at xprize.org.
