Electric Plant Company, a San Francisco-based agritech startup developing AI-powered plant monitoring technology, raised $11.2 million in a seed funding round led by Onto Ventures and Climactic.
The round included participation from Ponderosa, Endeavor Catalyst, Ludlow, Michigan Rise, The Fund, Schox VC and Dug Song. The funding announcement, made on October 20, 2026, coincided with the company’s emergence from stealth and the introduction of Bombadil, its AI foundation model for interpreting electrical signals from living plants.
Founded in 2023 by Justin Mast and Lee von Kraus, Electric Plant Company develops technology that measures plants’ electrical activity to provide information about their physiological condition. Mast serves as CEO and previously founded online plant retailer Bloomscape, while von Kraus serves as Chief Scientist and has a background in neuroscience.
The company’s technology combines Bud, a low-cost sensor that attaches directly to plant tissue and continuously records electrical signals, with Bombadil, a self-supervised AI model designed to interpret those signals and estimate indicators of plant health and stress.
According to the company, Bombadil was pretrained on more than 4 million hours of electrical recordings collected from over 1,400 plants representing 100 species. The model estimates seven physiological indicators, including photosynthetic efficiency, leaf temperature relative to surrounding air and crop water stress.
Electric Plant Company is developing the system for applications in agriculture, forestry, landscaping and plant care. Its approach aims to provide information about plants’ internal conditions rather than relying exclusively on soil measurements, weather information or visual inspections.
The company said early commercial deployments were already underway, with hundreds of sensors operating in the field. It licenses its technology to existing plant-care operators and plans to expand crop coverage, develop additional model capabilities and increase commercial deployment.
