In comforting news, post-bankruptcy, the founder and CEO of AppHarvest has gone on to start…uhh…The Nuclear Company?[0] Hopefully when it's ready they'll invite McConnell back to flip the switch.
I don’t get it. How could a high tech green house ever be more profitable than free sunshine, dirt
Your product gets, what? Max $2.50/# retail?
Needs (2023) - discussed previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34959649
Wow, I completely missed this when it was published back in 2023. I watched every briefing by the KY Governor and I remember AppHarvest coming up multiple times (9 times according to the daily transcripts people made on Reddit [0]). I remembering thinking how cool of an idea it was and how I really thought this could help our more rural areas.
It’s incredibly disappointing that this is how it turned out. Selling workers on the vision that they did and then completely going in the other direction is gross verging on evil. Especially the parts about top execs cashing out while employees and their friends/family invested in what they thought could be their future.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus_KY/search/?q=Appharvest...
JD Vance, Martha Stewart were on the board of this indoor vertical farming startup. It went public in 2020 via a Covid-era SPAC (Novus Capital Corp), in 2021 raised $700m then went public at a $1b valuation, was sued by shareholders for securities fraud in 2022 (Vance had left in 2021), then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2023.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppHarvest
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/appharvest-indoor-farming-bankrup...
[2]: Coverage of Plenty, Bowery, AppHarvest and AeroFarms https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/24/vertical-farming-company-p...