The first baltic team makes it into the prestigious accelerator.
The Baltics are no strangers to Silicon Valley accelerators, the “Estonian mafia” itself was coined by 500 Startup’s Dave McClure. But until now, the team behind the Click & Grow is the first to be accepted into Y Combinator, the accelerator that has spit out Dropbox and Airbnb to name a few.
As you might imply from their name, the Click & Grow provides an easy way to grow herbs or decorative plants from seed packets provided by the company. Through their own lighting and watering solution, you can set it aside knowing that your plant is going to be taken care of by LED lights and fancy algorithms.
We ourselves had a first generation Click & Grow, which sprouted some nice flowers until they died under mysterious circumstances – there was plenty of water. We renamed it the Click & Die but the form factor was nice enough that it stayed in our office, just for something to look at.
And it was a conversation starter. Just about everyone that saw one said it would be nice to have something to automatically grow them some herbs or decorative flowers. The market is there if you can get it into peoples’ hands.
According to Y Combinator’s blog post, Click & Grows are being sold at Home Depot and on Amazon, and the startup has shipped 250,000 devices to date.
Its hard to argue a trend from two points, but it’s interesting to see two “hardware” products coming out of our region accepted into Y Combinator. Wheely’s Cafe also looks a little different from a Dropbox or Airbnb.
