Two timelines — when each player emerged, and how the market grew up and shook out.
From 2004 to 2026, the controlled-environment-agriculture class boomed on cheap capital and busted on its own cost structure. Run alongside it is a second, quieter line: MicroHabitat, compounding on the asset-light path while the unicorns failed.
The rise, the peak, and the shakeout.
A field founded on aeroponics and rooftop greenhouses, inflated by a record 2021 capital wave, then thinned by a 2022–2025 bankruptcy run. Colour tracks the era: green founding and rise, amber peak, clay fall, bright green for what survives.
While the field boomed and busted, one line just kept climbing.
No LEDs, no HVAC, no debt — soil, rooftops and a recurring service. A stepped track that only ever goes up: from a single Montréal rooftop to roughly 400 farms across three continents.
Same two decades. Two endings — and the asset-light line is the one still standing.
Roots in ~2013 guerrilla gardening at McGill's Macdonald Campus. The cost structure that bankrupted the vertical-farming class — LEDs, HVAC, real estate and the debt to fund them — barely touches a soil-based service. As the shakeout cleared the field, the capital and talent that remain flow toward exactly the lean, recurring model MicroHabitat has run since 2016.
Certified B Corporation since April 2024 (B Impact score 85.9)