Investing in SoliDrip

How will the city of the future look like? Over the past decade an entire industry and research machinery emerged to answer this questions. While the smart city discussion is predominantly driven by sustainable energy and mobility concepts, there is another mostly untapped aspect of future cities: Urban Green Infrastructure.

Why is urban green infrastructure so important?
The global population in our cities is growing and this leaves us with two key challenges for our planet: First, increasing CO2 emissions and second, a decrease of arable land per capita on our planet. According to research the available square meters of arable land per capita will be reduced by more than 50% in 2030. Urban Green infrastructure enables cities to anticipate a compensation of both CO2 emission and food production through urban agriculture in the future.

Today, irrigation is one of the key challenges of urban green infrastructure. State of the art irrigation systems are designed for agricultural monocultures. Applying them to mix of plants on a small planting area such as green roofs, green facades or ornamental greening causes three mayor issues and we experienced them first hand in the Styx Living Lab:

Current drip irrigation systems require a lot of maintainance (e.g. changing batteries) and on the ground monitoring due to weather changes and seasonality.

It is almost impossible to reach a perfect result due to different water demands of plants in a small planting area.

Due to the inefficiency a lot of clean water is wasted.

SoliDrip’s technology is solving those challenges. The product is purely based on material engineering and physics, taking advantage of the capillary forces. It works like an artificial root and gives each plant exactly the amount of water it requires. As a validated result, SoliDrip reduces the amount of water by 60% (compared to state of the art drip irrigation) while providing better growing results. Additionally, the technology also prevents clean water runoffs due to its accuracy and adjust to weather conditions without any human interaction. One of the biggest asset of the system is the low setup and operating cost. It requires no programming, no battery changes or electricity at all. SoliDrip’s system is designed to let the plants take care of their irrigation by themselves.

Even though SoliDrip is a pure hardware product we decided to invest in it for multiple reasons:

Gad and Didi are experienced entrepreneurs and irrigation experts looking back at 25 years of experience in entrepreneurship and almost half a century, including multiple patents, in agriculture and drip irrigation.

Together with a Mannheim based Green Wall manufacturer and implementer, we tested the system for more than six weeks in the Styx Living. We were so convinced that we just started implementing it at the first green walls prior investment.

SoliDrip has the potential to become the irrigation platform for urban green infrastructure. It can be used in several use cases ranging from home gardening to urban farming or indoor greening.

Europe is the biggest market for urban green infrastructure. Supported by long term policies like the European Green Deal we believe that today is the right time to invest in company like SoliDrip.

We’re looking forward to be part of SoliDrips journey and support them with their go to market in Germany in spring 2022. Already today we’re conducting multiple implementations of SoliDrip’s system in the Styx Living Lab and there are more experiments to come.