Agritech: Vertical Farming & Cultivated Meat

Agritech spans two distinct AI-adjacent bets on reshaping food production: indoor vertical farming, where AI-controlled climate and lighting systems grow produce in stacked, weather-independent environments, and cultivated (lab-grown) meat, which uses cell-culture techniques rather than livestock. Both remain small relative to conventional agriculture and face a genuinely difficult funding environment -- vertical-farming venture capital has broadly dried up after a wave of well-funded startups scaled back or failed, and market-size estimates for the category vary enormously by methodology (roughly $7.5-15 billion in 2026 depending on whether greenhouse hardware and software are included). Cultivated meat is earlier-stage still, with global sales estimated at well under $500 million in 2026 by most research firms, though growth projections through the early 2030s remain steep off that small base. Plenty (vertical farming) and Upside Foods (cultivated meat, one of only two US companies with USDA approval alongside Good Meat) represent the startup side of these categories, while Bayer Crop Science applies AI and data science to conventional seed and crop-protection development at much larger, established scale.