Meet Niwa, the first in a new generation of smart food devices that makes growing your own vegetables, fruits and plants as easy, fun and interactive as a swipe of your smartphone screen.

Imagine a world where anyone and everyone—no matter where they are, how much free time they have, or how much they know about gardening—could grow their own fruits and vegetables from their very own home. Then, imagine the revolutionary impact that would have on our world, transforming everything from our environment to our economy to our health to our lives for the better.

Niwa is the first step toward putting our food in our own hands. Sound good? Join the fresh revolution today!

No green thumb? No problem! With Niwa, anyone and everyone can experience the pride, joy and unbelievably fresh taste of healthy home-grown foods.

Niwa is the first fully automated hydroponic system that attends to all of your plants’ needs so you don’t have to. Our revolutionary combination of hardware and software work together seamlessly to create the perfect growing environment, water and feed your plants as they need, and put you in control of it all from your smartphone.

Are you ready to get fresh? It’s as simple as 1,2,3:

The Niwa system is the culmination of 2 years of intensive research and development, the result of many iterations, trials, and prototypes and hours spent consulting with farming experts.

Niwa is…

SMART
Niwa’s microcontroller “brain” has all the experience and expertise of a seasoned farmer. You don’t need to worry about how often to water your plants, if they’re warm enough, or if the humidity is optimal for their growth, because Niwa knows it all!

COMPACT
Niwa was designed to mesh seamlessly with your home and your urban lifestyle. It’s small enough to fit in your living room yet large enough to grow full-sized fruits and vegetables as well as herbs. Niwa looks fantastic, so it will fit right in with your home decor; plus, there's absolutely no soil involved in the Niwa system, so it's mess-free too!

VERSATILE
Niwa can grow just about anything that will fit inside the tray, including most house plants, flowers, vegetables, several kinds of fruits and various herbs. We’ll be adding root vegetables to the list soon, so keep an eye out!

SIMPLE
There’s no pulling weeds, no ploughing, no tilling, no hoes — just the freshest, healthiest fruits and veggies. Just switch her on, sit back, and wait for your seeds to grow — it's as easy as that!

INTERACTIVE
For the first time ever, you can care for and interact with your plants straight from your mobile device, no matter where you are. Enjoy the experience, learn about your crops and, most excitingly of all, taste fresh, organic produce grown by you!

Growing your own food? There’s an app for that!

With the Niwa app, free for iOS and Android users, anyone with a smartphone has everything they need to start growing produce from the comfort and convenience of home:

Just tell the app what you want to grow and watch it load pre-programmed settings for your plant, covering everything from temperature to water supply to sunlight.

Watch your plants sprout and thrive before your eyes, and monitor their status and living conditions through your smartphone!

Connect with your plant and understand its progress. Provide feedback on growth stages and completed tasks, and receive quirky educational messages.

Experiment with climate variables or create your own custom settings for almost endless growing possibilities!

Because we all deserve a fresh perspective in life. Here are just a few of the ways Niwa can transform yours:

Be healthier as you taste the freshest,
healthiest and safest food on Earth,
grown right in your own living room.

Be happier as you watch your plants flourish
and thrive under your care — without the stresses
and frustrations of conventional gardening.

Be greener as you help to reduce environmental impact
by eliminating the problems of transportation,
packing and soil erosion.

Media outlets across the Internet and around the world are already buzzing about Niwa. We’ve been featured in over 100 magazines, blogs and publications including TechCrunch, CNET, FastCompany, and CNN!

Here are just a few of the things people are saying about Niwa:

The past few months have been an incredible time for Niwa, and we've made some amazing progress toward our goal of bringing simple, fun, interactive food growing technology to people around the world.

We have a full working prototype already built and hard at work growing a variety of spices that we’re using as trials to help us develop different growing programs.

In June, we completed a successful crowdfunding on Kickstarter, raising $151,173 fro 565 backers in just 40 days. Our Kickstarter backers believe in Niwa's revolutionary potential so much that they’re willing to wait 6-8 months for their unit to arrive. Once we ship the very first units of Niwa to these early adopter heroes, which we’re planning to do in early 2015, they will provide invaluable feedback that we will be able to use to make Niwa even better!

Niwa is honored and excited to have been accepted by the most prominent hardware accelerator in the world, HAXLR8R. As part of the HAXLR8R program, we recently spent four months in Shenzhen, China, sourcing factories and prototyping, and working with agricultural experts and interior and industrial designers to devise a model that would not only provide incredible performance and beautiful design, but that would also be optimally efficient and effective to manufacture.

Thanks to our amazing experience in Shenzhen and the help of our manufacturing team there, Niwa has gone from prototype to a finished, ready-to-manufacture product. For more information about where Niwa goes from here, and how you can get involved, please request access to the Business Plan page of this profile!

Javier Morillas is a passionate engineer who believes that sustainability can be achieved with the help of technology.

In his own words: “I started Niwa when I realized that thousands of tons of vegetables had to travel so far before getting to the final consumers. It made no sense to me. Then I started wondering what happened, why the production had gone that far from thee consumer? The answer I found was because we just can’t grow them ourselves; the lack of time, space, conditions or skills made this impossible. As a technology lover, I decided to start using technology to make the whole process simple and to enable everyone to grow their own food wherever they are.”

Agnieszka Nazaruk is a relentless entrepreneur and foodie and the business brains behind Niwa.

In her own words: “I’m passionate about bringing innovative technology solutions to address some of our most pressuring social and environmental problems. I’ve been working with NGOs and tech startups to bring new products to market. I believe that democratizing food production by making it fun and easy can truly change the way we grow, eat and live.

The Niwa team is honored to have the guidance and support of some of the most innovative and experienced minds in the global startup community:

Cyril Ebersweiler
Cyril is a venture partner at SOSventures and the founder of HAXLR8R. He built and ran the first mentorship-driven seed funding program in China, Chinaccelerator, home of the Techcrunch Disrupt winner Orderwithme. He also founded HAXLR8R, an accelerator for hardware-related startups based in Shenzhen and the Bay. He is mentoring at Techstars, 500\startups, OnLab and East Ventures Alpha, and is an advisor to the Global Accelerator Network (http://globalacceleratornetwork.com/about/) as well as a board member/advisor to a few startups, including Leap Motion. He has been investing across the universe (and beyond) and helps entrepreneurs become truly global.

Benjamin Joffe
GENERAL PARTNER, HAXLR8R.COM 

Benjamin is General Partner at HAXLR8R ("HAX"), the first startup accelerator building "lean hardware". An expert on startup ecosystems with 14 years experience in China, Japan, Korea and USA, he has been invited to speak in over 200 events across 23 countries including at TEDx, LeWeb, Stanford and Berkeley.

Prior to HAX, Benjamin founded the Plus8Star consultancy and worked with clients such as Microsoft, Tumblr and HBS to identify innovative services in Asia's digital space. Benjamin is also an angel investor in Asia-based and hardware startups.

Shawn Broderick
Shawn has 20+ years of experience creating value in software companies as an individual contributor, entrepreneur, intrapraneur, manager, investor, and leader. He has extensive and varied business development, sales, and partnering experience, and repeated success in developing products from concept to customer. Shawn has an exceptional track record of sourcing, hiring, and retaining stellar employees, and is accomplished at identifying both diamonds-in-the-rough as well as young talent – and grooming and extracting the best from both. He is adept at managing business teams, technical teams, and creative teams, and has broad experience raising institutional and angel funds for businesses and in sourcing LPs for investment vehicles.

Nick Plante
Software architect, product designer, author, and reluctant community organizer. Formerly co-founder of Wefunder, Mogoterra and Ubikorp Internet Services. Currently incubating his own web properties and creating developer ecosystem tools at Zerosum Labs.

Nick also consults with and advises a variety of startups, has spoken at a number of industry events, and regularly contributes to many popular open source projects. He is the creator of the Rails Rumble hackathon, the Rubydoc.info software docs resource, and an advisor at HAXLR8R. Nick’s book, Practical Rails Plugins, was published by Apress in June, 2008.

Specialties: Ruby, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript / CoffeeScript / Node / Angular, Java / Android development. Software, web and mobile product design, agile development methodologies, test-driven development, procurement and deployment scripting, capacity planning for web and mobile rollouts.