German agritech startup eternal.ag raises €8M to scale autonomous greenhouse harvest robots
Cologne-based eternal.ag says the new €8 million round will speed up deployments of its tomato-harvesting robot platform across Europe.
German agritech startup eternal.ag has announced an €8 million funding round aimed at expanding autonomous robotics in greenhouse production. The company is headquartered in Cologne and also operates from Bengaluru. The round was reported as backed by Simon Capital, Oyster Bay Venture Capital, EquityPitcher Ventures, and Backbone Ventures.
Its first commercial product is Harvester, an autonomous tomato-picking robot designed for commercial greenhouse conditions. The company says it follows a simulation-first development model: robot behavior is trained and validated in virtual greenhouses using NVIDIA Isaac Sim before hardware is deployed in live facilities. The stated objective is to reduce costly field failures.
The article frames this as a core industry bottleneck. Many greenhouse robotics teams have shown promising demos but struggled to maintain reliability at full commercial scale. eternal.ag’s approach is positioned as a response to that “lab-to-commercial” gap, where uptime, crop variability, and dense canopy conditions often break early systems.
Co-founder Renji John previously worked on the same problem through Honest AgTech in the Netherlands, which entered bankruptcy in July 2023 because of a liquidity shortfall. Together with co-founder Sherry Kunjachan, he is now attempting a second build-out with a clearer focus on validation speed and deployment robustness.
The company claims the robots can operate up to 22 hours per day and that every action in real installations feeds back into model improvement. At the same time, the article notes that several operational performance figures are company claims rather than independently audited numbers.
The new capital is intended to accelerate product development, increase commercial deployments across Europe, and extend the platform beyond tomatoes into additional crop tasks. eternal.ag’s long-horizon target is fully autonomous greenhouse operations by 2040, presented as a structural answer to persistent labor shortages in horticulture.