Red Sea Farms fishes out $1.9m

Red Sea Farms, a Saudi Arabia-based sustainable farming technology developer spun out of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (Kaust), has obtained $1.9m in a round backed by Kaust’s Innovation Fund, Arab News reported yesterday.
The round also included commercialisation firm Research Products Development Company, which agreed a co-investment partnership with Kaust Innovation Fund in February 2019.
Red Sea Farms creates technologies for growing crops with reduced quantities of freshwater and energy to help farmers produce more sustainably.
The spinout primarily focuses on making crops more resilient to saline so they can be grown in greenhouses with diluted saltwater as a partial substitute to fresh or desalinated water. It also develops indoor farming systems that cultivate crops in nutrient-enriched liquids as an alternative to soil.
Red Sea Farms will invest the seed capital in the development of a new 2,000 square metre saltwater greenhouse at Kaust’s campus in Saudi Arabia, with the goal of yielding 50 tons of saline-resistant tomatoes from the facility each year by 2020.
Red Sea also aims to retrofit 5% of Saudi Arabia’s greenhouses with its saltwater-based cooling technology and promises to make the farmers a return on their investments within two years.
Mark Tester, professor of plant science at Kaust’s biological, environmental science and engineering division, is one of the spinout’s co-founders.
He said: “The Middle East is one of the most water-scarce regions of the world. Here we often rely on unsustainable sources of water for irrigation, such as groundwater, which is being rapidly depleted, or desalinated water.