Evansville entrepreneur named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30
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An entrepreneur whose Evansville-based startup has developed an aeroponic smart garden appliance has been named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in the Manufacturing and Industry category.
Scott Massey is the co-founder and CEO of Anu, formerly known as GroPod, which has created a dishwasher-sized appliance that uses aeroponic seed pods to grow produce inside the home.
The technology was originally developed by Massey when he was a student at Purdue University.
“The user simply puts a pot in and harvests the plant out with no added step in between,” Massey told Inside INdiana Business in 2023. “That’s something that’s profoundly unique and intuitive and so simple that even children do it oftentimes with a lot of our household users,” said Massey.
In an interview for an upcoming edition of IIB’s Evansville Region Report newsletter, Massey said being named to the Forbes list was complete surprise and gave credit to his team and supporters he’s worked with over the years, including at Purdue and in Evansville.
Massey noted that there have been many other startups on each coast that have tried to do what Anu is doing in cities much larger than Evansville, but they have “essentially all failed” in their efforts.
“[They have] raised incredible amounts of capital and talent, and they’re very smart, good people, but they don’t have what Indiana has. They don’t have the world leading agricultural technology experience that Purdue University has. They don’t have the appliance history of manufacturing engineering design. They don’t have the polymer plastics experience that Evansville and the broader southern Indiana area leads the world in.”
Anu has raised $6 million in funding, according to Forbes, including a $1 million Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant in January 2023 and a $200,000 Indiana Manufacturing Readiness Grant from by the Indiana Economic Development Corp. last August.
Recently, Massey has been taking the technology to Africa to address food insecurity in the Kingdom of Lesotho, with the goal of expanding efforts across the continent.
You can connect to the full Forbes 30 Under 30 list by clicking here.
We’ll have more on Massey’s efforts in Lesotho in a future edition of the Evansville Region Report newsletter. you can subscribe to the newsletter by clicking here.