Technology and Scienceupdated 1h ago2 min read
Electric Plant Emerges From Stealth With $11.2M Funding And Bombadil Plant AI Model
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Electric Plant raised $11.2 million in seed funding to launch Bombadil AI model. Bombadil translates plant electrical signals into health readings; foundation model interprets signals across 125 species.
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Bombadil translates plant signals
Electric Plant emerged from stealth with $11.2 million in seed funding and the debut of Bombadil, an AI foundation model for plant electrophysiology. Justin Mast said, "Bombadil makes that kind of intimate knowledge possible at scale, using data derived from inside the plant itself." Electric Plant said Bombadil was trained on more than 4 million hours of recordings across 100 species and a range of environments.
Electric Plant said Bud sensor translates a tree’s electrical signals into the Bombadil AI foundation model for real time health results. Electric Plant said Bombadil 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.
Sensors, cloud, and markers
Electric Plant said Bud attaches directly to a plant and records electrical signals in its tissue that relate to the plant's physiological state, including signs of stress. Electric Plant said the signal is sent to Bombadil, the foundation model, which decodes these signals and estimates seven physiological stress markers from the electrical signal alone. Justin Mast told TechCrunch, "We’re listening more than we’re speaking, but listening’s the first step," as Electric Plant positioned Bombadil as a way to interpret electrical signals coursing through a plant’s stem.
Electric Plant said Bombadil applies to plant biology the same self-supervised approach that reshaped AI for language and neuroscience, and it was pretrained without labels on more than 4 million hours of electrical recordings from over 1,400 plants across 100 species. Electric Plant said Bombadil learns the underlying structure of these signals, which allows it to estimate markers including photosystem II efficiency and the Crop Water Stress Index (CWSI).
Funding and what comes next
Electric Plant said it 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. TechCrunch said Electric Plant raised an $11.2 million seed round led by Onto Ventures and Climactic, with participation from Ponderosa, Endeavor Catalyst, Ludlow, Michigan Rise, The Fund, Schox VC, and Dug Song. Electric Plant said its 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.
Electric Plant said 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. Electric Plant said it released a technical whitepaper documenting how Bombadil works, and it said the sensors are connected to plants through stainless steel screws that penetrate the layer of living tissues.