Hiphen

This interview details Hiphen, an indoor farming technology company based in France. The interview is with Alexis Comar, Founder and CEO of Hiphen.

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What is the origin story of Hiphen?  

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I earned my Ph.D. at INRAE at a pioneering time for field high throughput phenotyping. I was focused on the interaction between leaves and light and its consequences for remote sensing applications.

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With the mission of making these remote and proximal sensing tools more broadly accessible to crop researchers in academia, government, NGO, and industry, I co-founded HIPHEN in 2014 and have led its growth as CEO since. Today HIPHEN connects breeders, researchers, and CEA professionals worldwide to plant phenotyping and crop image analysis tools and now engages the skills of more than 30 agronomists, engineers, and scientists in France and the USA to deliver insightful analytics.

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

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One of our most interesting challenges is working with the diverse systems and growing configurations in the indoor farming world which require custom configurations to get sensors to the right place at the right time to capture imagery that delivers impactful information to our customers.

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What is unique about Hiphen compared to competitors?  

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We tailor our solutions to the specific needs of each client. We don’t offer off-the-shelf products; we understand a need and deliver a bespoke solution to tackle it. Because we are a full-stack imaging solutions provider and sensor agnostic, we aren’t limited to making a specific piece of equipment fit a need. We can select the best sensors for the job and configure them into a sensor array specific to a grower’s operation.  

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What are some other relevant metrics of the company (customer count, team size, etc.)?  

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We have over 100 clients around the globe. Some of our notable clients include Moet & Chandon, Syngenta, CIMMYT, and ICARDA. We also work with many other organizations, researchers, and NGOs involved in plant research globally.  

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Every year our team of more than 30 image solution experts extract information from images of plants from millions of research plots and pots around the globe.  

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What are some goals in 2024 and beyond for Hiphen?  

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Every day we wake up and try to think of new ways to deliver more exciting technology and value to our existing and new customers.    

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This year we plan on integrating new pipelines to process imagery from drones in greenhouses.  We are also planning to turn the unique new data we generate into decision-making tools to improve and accelerate decisions for production and product development.  

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My vision is that within 5 years, we will become a team of nearly 200 agronomic engineers, data scientists, and software engineers spread across the world to meet the vast unmet image analysis needs we see around the globe today.  

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

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We encourage you to check out our website where you can learn more about our services, read scientific papers we have participated in, watch webinars on specific areas of interest, and most importantly, book a time on our calendar to meet with an expert and discuss what we could be doing for you. You can also follow our blog and sign up for our newsletter to read about our most current releases. Find us on LinkedIn and YouTube, and join us at events, upcoming tradeshows, and conferences we will be attending.

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