An Estonian founder who made indoor growing as easy as a coffee pod.
Click & Grow sells countertop smart gardens with pre-seeded Plant Pods: seeds, smart soil and controlled-release fertiliser in one cartridge, plus an LED grow light and a self-watering tank. Users fill the tank, plug it in and harvest herbs within weeks. The system removes the three things that kill most indoor plants: forgetting to water, bad lighting and wrong feeding.
Mattias Lepp founded the company in Estonia in 2009 around a 'Smart Flowerpot' concept validated in a local competition. He used Kickstarter repeatedly as a demand test: the 2013 Smart Herb Garden campaign raised $625,851 from 10,477 backers before shipping in 2014. An $11M Series A in 2018, backed by Ingka Group (IKEA) and Y Combinator, scaled manufacturing and retail, and pandemic-era demand ran three to five times normal. Pairing the hardware with recurring pod refills built a razor-and-blades model across 500,000+ gardens sold.
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Water saved (by 2023)150 billion gallons
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Indiegogo (2021)$7.23M / ~19,000 backers
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Total funding$55M
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