No workers, no harvest - Eternal.ag's €8M bet on fully autonomous greenhouses

Europe's greenhouses keep expanding, but the people who work in them are vanishing. According to Eurostat, the EU lost the equivalent of 3.5 million full-time agricultural workers between 2009 and 2024, at an average annual rate of decline of 2.5%. Harvesting is still manual, seasonal, and physically punishing, exactly the kind of work that gets harder to staff every year.

Eternal.ag, a German agritech startup headquartered in Cologne, builds fully autonomous harvesting robots designed to eliminate greenhouse operators' dependency on manual labour. The company was founded in 2025 by Renji John (CEO) and Sherry Kunjachan.

Its first product, Harvester, is purpose-built for tomato truss harvesting. The robot uses real-time computer vision to read plant height, canopy density, truss position and ripeness, then performs precision stem cuts. Crucially, the system is trained on a grower's specific greenhouse conditions through simulation before physical deployment, cutting iteration cycles from months to days. According to Eternal, Harvester is capable of operating up to 22 hours per day at a rate of up to 120 trusses per hour, with no human operator required.

The platform is modular, designed to expand beyond tomatoes into additional crop types and robotic functions, moving growers toward fully automated greenhouse operations. Each robot action feeds data back into the AI system, which learns and improves over time.

Recently Eternal.ag has raised €8 million in seed funding from Simon Capital, Oyster Bay Venture Capital, EquityPitcher Ventures, and Backbone Ventures, and has grown to a 26-person team across Cologne and Bengaluru.

Sources: eternal.ag / Crunchbase

Founders: Renji John, Sherry Kunjachan