Eternal.ag, a German agritech startup developing autonomous harvesting robots for greenhouses, announced it has raised €8 million in funding to accelerate its European expansion and advance its robotics platform across additional crop types.
The round was backed by Simon Capital, Oyster Bay Venture Capital, EquityPitcher Ventures, and Backbone Ventures. The company is focused on addressing labor shortages in greenhouse agriculture by deploying AI-powered robots that can operate continuously and deliver consistent harvesting performance.
Greenhouse farming is increasingly seen as a resilient solution for year-round food production amid climate change and supply chain pressures. However, the sector faces growing labor shortages, with availability in Europe declining significantly over the past decade. Eternal.ag aims to eliminate this constraint by automating physically demanding harvesting tasks.
The company’s first commercial product, Harvester, is designed for tomato greenhouses and can operate up to 22 hours per day. The system uses AI to ensure consistency in crop handling and is built on a modular platform that can expand into additional greenhouse functions over time. Eternal.ag is also leveraging simulation-first development to accelerate testing and deployment, enabling rapid iteration and continuous learning from real-world operations.
Founded in 2025, the company has grown to a 26-person team across Europe and India, with headquarters in Cologne and an office in Bengaluru. The new capital will be used to scale product development, expand deployments across European markets, and extend capabilities to new crop categories.
Eternal.ag’s long-term vision is to enable fully autonomous greenhouse operations by 2040, reducing reliance on manual labor while improving reliability and output consistency for growers.
KEY QUOTES:
“Autonomous robots only work if they can handle real-world variability between plants, layouts, and daily operations. We develop and validate our robots using simulation-first development. That allows us to train, test, and fail safely in virtual greenhouses, cutting iteration cycles from months to days. Once deployed, every robot action feeds data back into the system, which is designed to learn, improve and scale.”
Renji John, CEO And Co-Founder Of Eternal.ag
“Climate change, labor shortages, and rising demand are pushing food production to its limits. Greenhouse horticulture is one of the most efficient and sustainable ways to grow fresh produce year-round. Yet, labor shortages put the industry at risk, and robotics is the only future-proof solution to build a decentralized, resilient food supply chain for the next generation. Eternal.ag’s experienced team has a deep understanding of what growers are up against and has developed a solution to tackle this in a sustainable and measured way.”
Niklas Leske, Principal At Simon Capital
