We built a company around this very problem- indoor farming (including vertical indoor farming) is pretty complex and by default it's energy hungry. In theory, indoor farming is very efficient for commercial food production though. I thought we could be the company that does all the plant biology, automation complexity magic for growers, and growers just do seedling and harvesting in a super basic mechanical setup.
We are working with growers in EU, and they are all actually profitable growing normal veggies (lettuce, kale, etc.) as usual. But whenever we talked to some of the fancy VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies, they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves. Almost always, the leadership in these companies was the type that didn't know anything about plants, software, status quo of AI, etc.
We are working with growers in EU, and they are all actually profitable growing normal veggies (lettuce, kale, etc.) as usual. But whenever we talked to some of the fancy VC-backed vertical indoor farming companies, they would usually not entertain us and would always claim that they were going to build everything by themselves. Almost always, the leadership in these companies was the type that didn't know anything about plants, software, status quo of AI, etc.