🌽  Indoor farming 2.0

👋  Good morning. It's our duty to bring you the day's most important news, so here it is: There's a new internet-famous animal and his name is Jimothy. The Seattle raccoon — who likely has a rare spine condition that gives him a uniquely short and stout build — has become a local legend, inspiring murals, tattoos, and millions of views online.

NEWS FLASH 

☀️ The forecast gets personal: Miami startup FortyGuard built AI-powered Large Temperature Models that can map temperatures at street level — ~2 meters above the ground — creating block-by-block heat maps much more precise than traditional weather forecasts. The company says its US usership recently rose 50% month over month, largely driven by its free platform, and it’s collaborating with companies including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.

📱 Second act: After shuttering its banking app for teenagers, Seattle startup Copper pivoted into consumer rewards with a platform that lets 4m+ users earn money through shopping, cash-back offers, and mobile games. Plus, it has a cool new investor: Grammy-winning artist Diplo.

🤖 Bad bots! OpenAI said that one of its advanced AI models broke out of controlled security testing, reached the internet, and autonomously hacked AI platform Hugging Face while attempting to complete its assigned objective. The company said the incident is “unprecedented” and that it’ll beef up safeguards to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Sounds like justice: Sony Music is suing AI music startup Udio, alleging that the startup scraped 30k+ recordings from YouTube to train its song-generating tech. 
  
• Hungry hungry AI: Data centers are estimated to use one-fifth of the electricity generated in the US — 4x today’s usage — by 2035, according to data from BloombergNEF. 
  
• Once upon an AI: Meta is testing StoryKit, an AI app that lets users generate personalized children’s books with custom characters, illustrations, narration, and music. 
  
• “We’re crushing it on retention”… says some exec, oblivious to what’s really going on: Nearly a quarter of US workers say they’re staying in unwanted jobs so they can keep their health insurance. Bleak.
  

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM

AI goes to Washington

The next AI battle may be fought at the ballot box.

Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI leaders, and others are backing competing political groups as the industry ramps up its efforts to influence how AI is governed in Washington.

👉 Read more on Mindstream.

THE BIG IDEA

Can indoor farming finally put down roots?

If there were a "cemetery of agribusiness," it would have a sizable section filled with vertical farming startups that died in the early 2020s.

Enticed by the prospect of skyscrapers full of lettuce, VCs poured billions into companies that promised to save space and minimize agricultural waste by growing crops at scale indoors.

Unfortunately, that's not how it shook out:

• Bowery Farming raised $700m to grow pesticide-free leafy greens in urban centers, only to cease operations in 2024.
  

• Investors sank $940m in Plenty Unlimited, a company specializing in vertically farmed berries, before it filed for bankruptcy in 2025.
  

• Florida-based Kalera filed for bankruptcy in 2023.

So where did these indoor farming businesses go wrong?

High construction and energy costs, razor-thin agricultural margins, and the challenge of competing with highly efficient traditional farms all proved difficult to overcome.

Photosynthesis requires sunlight (hello, B+ in AP Bio), and several indoor farms racked up unsustainable electricity bills trying to replace it with LED lights.

Could there be another way?

California startup Hippo Harvest separates itself from those companies with two key tenets:

• It uses the actual sun.
  
• It gets robots involved.

The startup eschews the notion of "vertical farming," housing its crops in high-tech greenhouses rather than in multi-level, space-saving buildings.

Though other companies have used similar structures, Hippo Harvest differentiates itself with who tends its crops: autonomous mobile robots that function like tiny indoor tractors. Think: Roomba meets John Deere.

The results, per the company: 92% less water use, 94% less land, zero synthetic pesticides, and a price point competitive with outdoor-grown produce.

What's next?

Hippo Harvest just closed a $30m Series C backed by greenhouse giant Cox Farms, unlocking a 30-acre expansion in Hollister, California.

Though scaling that aggressively could backfire, it just got a massive vote of confidence from one of the world's largest growers.

That kind of bet isn't a science project — it's a legitimate supply chain play.

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NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Five-year increase in US sales recorded by Armormax, a Utah-based company that turns “regular vehicles into extraordinary bulletproof machines.” Once reserved for banks and law enforcement, domestic demand for armored cars — retrofitting for which starts at ~$50k — has surged since the pandemic, per The New York Times, with many anxious one-percenters (who seem to have taken those “eat the rich” chants too literally) preparing for the worst.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1996, the US women’s gymnastics team (AKA the Magnificent Seven) took home gold at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia.

🎨  Game: Cycle through pop culture characters, all missing just one color from their iconic looks. Your job? Find the right tone.

🔠  That’s interesting: Why crossword puzzles are more popular than ever right now.

📹  How to: make a stop-motion video, starring a clay cow named Jerry.

🐈  Aww: A 17-second journey from kitten to adult cat.

SHOWER THOUGHT

The best way to succeed is to repeatedly fail first. The exception being when even one single failure leads to catastrophic disaster.  SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Singdhi Sokpo and Jay Fuchs.

Editing by: Sara "Lettuce hope" Friedman.

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