Justin Mast’s life was changed by a cyborg plant.
A few years ago, while reading the scientific literature, Mast came across a study about houseplants wired to motorized stands. When plants needed more light, electrical signals flowed through the living tissue. A control board senses the electrical current and moves the plant closer to the light source.
“What the hell?” Mast told TechCrunch. “That was the entrance into the rabbit hole for me.”
Mast founded Electric Plant in partnership with DARPA-affiliated neuroscientist Lee von Krauss, and has spent the past three years collecting data to build Bombadil, a large-scale language model. Bombadil can interpret subtle electrical signals flowing through a plant’s stem and tell the grower details about the plant’s needs.
The founders believe their model could one day lead to tools that allow humans to “talk” to plants. “We listen more than we talk, but listening is the first step,” said Mast, co-founder and CEO of Electric Plant.
To bring Sensor and Bombadil to market, Electric Plant recently raised $11.2 million in a seed round led by Onto Ventures and Climactic with participation from Ponderosa, Endeavor Catalyst, Ludlow, Michigan Rise, The Fund, Schott VC, and Doug Song.
Even in the best-maintained greenhouses, Mast said, farmers and growers still don’t fully understand what their plants need. Traditionally, farmers, growers, and foresters have relied on crude tools that respond to a plant’s needs for water, nutrients, or light. And while tools such as soil surveys, handheld spectrometers, and satellite imagery work well, Mast says they still leave much to be desired.
“The technology is sophisticated, but the ability to access the inside of the plant is not as sophisticated. Most of it is still quite far behind the real-time needs of the plant,” he said.
But Electric Plant needed to start somewhere, so they used these devices to train a Bombadil model that can interpret the electrical signals of about 125 different species. “We know this model will outperform a lot of equipment,” Mast said.
The startup’s sensors are also significantly cheaper than existing tools, which typically cost thousands of dollars. “This is a few dozen dollars,” he said.
The sensor is about the size of a regular iPhone folded vertically and attaches to plants using stainless steel screws. The screws must penetrate the cambium (the layer of living tissue just below the bark) to connect to the microvolt changes that occur within the plant. The data collected from these sensors is transmitted to the base station via a low-power wireless network.
Electric plants only need a few sensors per acre to get accurate results, Mast said. The data is interpreted by Bombadil in the cloud and the results are sent back to the customer, who can use it to adjust watering or fertilization schedules, for example. Mast claims that such a system can increase yields while reducing water usage by more than 20%.
Mast wouldn’t say who Electric Plant’s first customers will be, but it’s easy to imagine applications in agriculture and forestry.
Bombadil’s first 100-plus species span every plant form from ferns, sequoias and tomatoes to dahlias, Mast said.
“This is the most diverse model ever created for biological electrical signals,” he said. “No one in the animal kingdom has done anything comparable.”
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