Electric Plant Company Launches From Stealth With $11.2M in Funding and a Foundation AI Model for Plants, Bombadil

Bloomscape founder launches plant AI company building the first AI foundation model that translates the electrical signals of living plants into a continuous readout of their health.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Electric Plant Company today emerged from stealth with $11.2 million in seed funding and the debut of Bombadil, the first AI foundation model for plant electrophysiology. Trained on more than 4 million hours of recordings across 100 species and a range of environments, Bombadil is the most species-diverse foundation model ever built on biological signals. It reads a plant's health state directly from the plant's own electrical activity, rather than inferring it from the soil, the weather, or what the eye can see.

For as long as people have cultivated plants, they have been understood from the outside, by watching leaves, testing soil, and reading the sky. Bombadil represents a monumental step forward: understanding plants from the inside. Unlike humans or animals, plant electrical signals can be recorded continuously, in the field, by the thousands, making this one of the most scalable frontiers for biosignal AI. Electric Plant's data corpus has already grown to 7 million hours since the model's first training run, more than all publicly available recordings of human brain activity combined. It's the same approach that built today's language models, the more a foundation model learns from, the more it can understand.

Electric Plant Company has built the full stack needed to read plants across species from the hardware that captures a plant's electrical signal to the AI that makes sense of it. It was co-founded in 2023 by CEO Justin Mast, who previously founded and led Bloomscape, and Chief Scientist Lee von Kraus, a Ph.D. neuroscientist who has worked with DARPA and the U.S. EPA.

Bud, Electric Plant Company’s low-cost sensor, attaches directly to a plant and records electrical signals in its tissue that relate to the plant's physiological state, including signs of stress. That signal is sent to Bombadil, the foundation model, which decodes these signals and estimates seven physiological stress markers from the electrical signal alone and turns a stream of raw voltage readings into insights on the plant's condition that are reported clearly to a user.

"Master gardeners spend a lifetime learning a single plot, from the soil moisture level to the way the sunlight hits a tree in a specific corner," said Justin Mast, co-founder and CEO of Electric Plant Company. “Bombadil makes that kind of intimate knowledge possible at scale, using data derived from inside the plant itself. It's the same kind of AI that learned to read our language and images, now reading across the plant kingdom, and it puts understanding that once took years to develop within reach of anyone who tends a plant.”

Today, the company released a technical whitepaper documenting how Bombadil works. Pretrained without labels on more than 4 million hours of electrical recordings from over 1,400 plants across 100 species, Bombadil applies to plant biology the same self-supervised approach that reshaped AI for language and neuroscience. Bombadil learns the underlying structure of these signals, which allows it to estimate markers including photosystem II efficiency, leaf temperature relative to the surrounding air, and the Crop Water Stress Index (CWSI), an established agricultural standard for measuring water stress, even in species it never encountered during pretraining. The model is built to grow with customers and data so that new tasks, from flagging a specific disease to predicting bloom timing, attach as new readouts on the same core model rather than requiring a new model each time. It’s built to be a base that research and industry can build on.

"Most earlier models of plant electrical signals worked for one species in one setting, so a new plant or new environment meant starting over," said James Kirk, head of AI/ML at Electric Plant Company. "Bombadil learns what is common across species, which is why it can read a plant it never saw in training. That generalization is the breakthrough, and it is what lets the technology scale."

Plant care today is primarily focused on reading a plant from the outside: soil moisture, satellite images, or visual inspection from horticulturalists and agronomists, which make guesses based on a plant’s surroundings. By providing growers with granular, real-time visibility into a plant's state, a new level of intimate care that has never been possible at scale can become the standard. Electric Plant Company is creating a world where all plants, from household plants, to those in national parks and commercial farms, can be understood and cared for on their own terms.

"What excited us about Electric Plant is the possibility that all plants share an underlying electrical language that can be learned across species,” said Tom McQuillen, Partner at Onto Ventures. “Bombadil turns previously unreadable noise into a foundation model that becomes more capable as more plants are connected. This unlocks an entirely new interface between us and plants, which underpin trillions of dollars in economic activity across industries."

The seed round was led by Onto Ventures and Climactic, with participation from Ponderosa, Endeavor Catalyst, Ludlow, Michigan Rise, The Fund, Schox VC, and Dug Song. Early deployments are already running at commercial sites, with hundreds of sensors in the field. Electric Plant licenses its technology to the operators already running plant care businesses rather than replacing them, and is accepting additional founding operators as it expands crop by crop.

To learn more about Electric Plant Company, visit electricplant.co.

About Electric Plant Company:

The Electric Plant Company decodes the electrical signals plants use to communicate, applying plant electrophysiology research to give farmers, agribusinesses, scientists and consumers a direct read on what a plant needs. Bud, Electric Plant's sensor, attaches to a plant and records its electrical activity, while Bombadil, its foundation AI model, is trained on electrical signal data from 100 plant species and translates those signals into a clear answer — water, nutrients, or attention — in place of costly in-person inspections.

Electric Plant is co-founded by Justin Mast, CEO, who previously founded Bloomscape, a popular online garden retailer and Lee von Kraus, Chief Scientist, a neuroscientist who has worked with DARPA and NASA and previously co-founded Halo Neuroscience. The company has secured $11.2M in funding to date and is headquartered in San Francisco. For more information, visit electricplant.co.