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Pure Harvest, the UAE-founded controlled environment agriculture company, sees opportunity in expansion to the USA and Mexico in addition to Morocco and Singapore as it moves along the path to IPO in 2027 or 2028.
The company, headed by CEO Sky Kurtz, who was himself born in Arizona, told Zawya he sees the USA Sun Belt, the desert or semi-desert states in the country’s south, and Mexico as ‘a wonderful opportunity’ in addition to shorter term plans to farm in Morocco and Singapore.
Pure Harvest Smart Farms was founded in 2017 on the back of a pie in the sky ‘growing tomatoes in the desert’ idea. It has since expanded to incorporate greens and berries and recently launched sauces and jams.
The firm is operational in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman, and is in the middle of a $100 million fundraising round, working with Rothschild & Co, which Kurtz hopes will be its last major raise before IPO or sale.
Kurtz said the firm is profitable and produces 15 million kilograms of produce per year.
Upcoming projects include a scheme with the Singaporean government, under which Pure Harvest will develop a commercial proof of concept, which if successful will lead to a farm in the city state’s Lim Chu Kang (LCK) development - a food security space of 390 hectares set aside by the government to domesticate food production, reducing reliance on Chinese and Malaysian imports.
The company is also planning to farm in Morocco, which Kurtz said benefits from being geographically similar to California, with abundant natural light and low labour costs, allowing Pure Harvest to farm and export produce by truck to Europe with a lower carbon footprint than producing it in climates with cold winters, which is energy intensive.
Other growth will include further expansion in Saudi Arabia, following the acquisition of the RedSea Smart Farm operations as well as another project in Kuwait.
Kurtz is careful to point out that Pure Harvest is not merely in the business of vertical farming – farming using vertical stacked layers, often indoors or covered, which saves space but can also be less energy or water intensive. Techniques used by the company encompass controlled environment agriculture, which can be everything from using a net suspended on a stick to protect crops, drip irrigation, all the way to an AI-powered robot harvested vertical farm, he said.
“We have decoupled the relationship of food production from climate, and we have married it to technology, knowhow, or capabilities, capital and energy,” he said.
Pure Harvest is ‘hunting and discussing with many targets’ in Morocco, Kurtz said.
The company is backed by UAE-founded investor Shorooq, but Kurtz said it is time to look to later stage investors as it heads closer to a possible IPO.
“We need family offices, holding companies and growth equity investors. Or, sovereign funds, alternative pools of capital, institutional investors or business development companies (BDCs) or real estate investment trusts,” he said.
Another factor of Pure Harvest’s business is retrofitting technology, not just for controlled environment farmers, but working with players from traditional farming to transform existing facilities into controlled environment agriculture and benefitting from off-take.
“We inure them with our capabilities as if they were us, we co-invest with them and we support them. We believe in supporting them as a service,” he said.
“I’m hopeful that governments would see this as a powerful way to support the local farmers, and a profitable way to do that, they’re supporting the transition of this farmer from a less sustainable way of farming to the new world,” he said.
Regarding a possible IPO, Kurtz said he hopes to see it happen in 2027, 10 years after the company was founded, or 2028, with a UAE listing likely, depending on growth and expansion in the intervening period.
Red Sea, the controlled environment farming facilities launched with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and later acquired by Pure Harvest, announced a University of Arizona tie-up in January 2022, suggesting possibilities for Pure Harvest to set up in the USA.
Kurtz said America is a ‘really wonderful opportunity and we would really like to be there’, although his native state of Arizona is prone to monsoon-style storms, making farming difficult.
There are increasing capabilities in controlled environment agriculture in Mexico, he said.
The core of Pure Harvest’s business is within 4,000 miles of the equator, which Kurtz refers to as ‘flying into the sun’ due to the challenge of farming in intense heat and humidity.
“We are trying to be a solution where climate change is rendering traditional agriculture less effective,” he concluded.
(Reporting by Imogen Lillywhite; editing by Brinda Darasha)
