Jungle

This interview details Jungle, an indoor farming company based in France. The interview is with Nicolas Seguy, CEO / General Director of Jungle.

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What is the origin story of Jungle?

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We created Jungle with Gilles in Lisbon (Portugal) in 2016 after spending a year researching the State of the industry, which back then, was not even an industry! We traveled globally in Japan, Singapore, the US, Holland, Germany and met as many people as we could including the pioneer VF entrepreneurs of that time.

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After this global State-of-the-art investigation, we concluded there was no clear Business model we could stick to and therefore agreed on starting from scratch, designing and building an R&D system, and focusing on growing plants and collecting data. We started to include a commercial angle in 2019 when we signed our 1^st Proof of concept with a leading Mass Retailer and decided the same year to move our Operations to France to get closer to more large-scale customers.

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What are some of the biggest challenges facing Jungle in the future? 

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Our biggest challenges are:

1. To scale rapidly while ensuring an increasingly positive profitable equation. This is particularly the case for us when dealing with both Food and Beauty/Health sectors.
2. Obviously, as everyone is aware, aligning the right funding solutions has become a challenge in an industry that needs to face the reality of industrial economics which is not the same as pure Tech or other scalable models such as SaaS. Both VF players and Financial players need to align on what realistic ROIs are and long it takes to get there.

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What is unique about Jungle compared to competitors? 

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Our Health & Beauty vertical is clearly an area of differentiation that has taken years to study and understand. The Beauty, Luxury, and cosmetics industries are very secretive, and it takes time to understand the economics and how VF can create value in a sustainable manner. R&D cycles on those crops also tend to be much longer since KPIs not only concern biomass production but much stricter Quality requirements, microbiological metrics, and molecular activity.

Meanwhile, I believe we are one of the very few players to have operated 4 distinct VF technical solutions from different equipment providers. That has generated tremendous learning value, a better understanding of what is worth investing in and what is not, what is truly vital for a successful outcome, ete.

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What are some other relevant metrics of the company (growing area size, production quantity, team size, etc.)?

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We currently operate 1500m2 of net growing area dedicated to commercial production. We also run 100% dedicated R&D activities over 120m2 allowing us to test recipes at a very small scale first, then push the protocols to a semi-industrial environment.

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What are some goals in 2024 and beyond for Jungle?

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Our goal in 2024 is to consolidate our customers and product mix into our existing production capacity and be laser-focused on improving our main unit economics, productivity, power consumption per Kg of output…We are confident we can meet those targets by year-end and place us on a path to breakeven within 18 months.

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How can people connect with you or learn more about Jungle?

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Through LinkedIn both on my personal page and Jungle.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolasseguy/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/jungle-concept

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