Growing food inside a greenhouse sounds simple: put the plants under cover, keep them watered, and harvest. In practice, a modern protected farm is a machine with dozens of moving parts. Temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, light, water and nutrients all shift through the day, and all of them have to stay inside narrow bands or the crop suffers. For most Indian growers, running that machine meant round-the-clock manual attention — or expensive imported automation built for Dutch glasshouses, not Indian polyhouses. A Gujarat startup decided the answer was a digital brain built for Indian farms: hardware, sensors and software that run the whole farm on autopilot.
4Climate, the Ahmedabad- and Vadodara-based company behind the system, was founded by Subhajit Sinha and Vasu Faldu. Sinha, a postgraduate from IIITDM Kancheepuram, first fell for hydroponic farming at an IIT Madras exhibition, where he saw plants growing without soil; the idea became his master’s thesis on intelligent IoT solutions for commercial farming. Faldu, an electronics graduate from Gujarat University, brought the hardware expertise. After four years of research and development, the system went commercial in India in early 2024, with incubation support from iCreate and grants from the Department of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and seed backing from Indigram Labs and IIT Bombay’s Technology Innovation Hub.
At the heart of the system is the Intelligent Farm Automation Suite, built around the company’s XGRID controller. The cabinet handles up to 600 kW of electrical load across 32 expandable relay channels, with a touchscreen panel that puts the whole farm at the grower’s fingertips. The company’s edge controllers run the control logic on site — irrigation, fertigation, climate equipment, lighting and actuators — so decisions never have to wait on the cloud. Sensors track temperature, humidity, soil moisture and CO2 in real time, and the system drives the farm’s pumps, fans, heaters, valves and lights. “Our edge controllers manage all on-site operations, including irrigation, fertigation, climate equipment, lighting, and actuators,” Sinha says.
Feeding the plants is a job of its own, and 4Climate built a dedicated machine for it. The Intelligent Nutrient Delivery suite is an automatic fertigation system that monitors pH and electrical conductivity and doses nutrients to a precise recipe: up to 240 litres per hour of flow, 50,000-litre batch mixing, and eight independent nutrient injectors, run by an ARM Cortex-M2 controller with a 7-inch touch display. It supports circulative and non-circulative systems, single or multi-recipe setups, and multiple zones, so different crops in the same farm can each get their own feed.
Above the hardware sits the Crop AI Platform, the company’s FarmOS dashboard. It gives every grower a customised IoT dashboard for cloud monitoring and analytics, powered by a rule engine, crop steering and a farm autopilot, available on Android, iOS and the web. The company is now building a predictive farm-intelligence layer that lets growers test different conditions virtually before applying them in real life.
The footprint is already substantial. The company says it supports more than 125 controlled-environment agriculture installations across India and the Middle East and North Africa, managing 2 million square feet of farm area that generates $6.5 million of produce a year. About 85 percent of the installations are hi-tech greenhouses and naturally ventilated polyhouses, with the rest in indoor vertical farms and speed-breeding facilities, growing more than 45 crop varieties — exotic leafy greens, vegetables, fruits and berries. Key clients include Flow Farms in Qatar and ITC Hotel Bhopal, and as an OEM partner 4Climate supplies intelligent automation suites to Nexsel, the Pune LED grow-light maker, for its speed-breeding facilities. The company rolled out across the Gulf in mid-2025 and plans to expand into the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Oman from 2026.
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The work has picked up recognition along the way: 4Climate was named to YourStory’s Tech30 cohort of India’s most promising startups for 2025, was a Top 10 finalist at Gulfood’s World AgriFoodTech Challenge 2026, made the Top 20 of the UAE-India CEPA Council’s list, and ranked in the Top 13 of Saudi Arabia’s MEWA Sunbolah programme. The company says its systems protect $1.2 million worth of crops a year, process more than 5 million data points a day, avoid 8,500 tonnes of CO2 a year and save 100,000 litres of water every day. And it is priced for the growers it serves: automation systems run from about Rs 2 lakh for a small 1,000 sq ft indoor farm to Rs 6–8 lakh for a fully automated two- to three-acre greenhouse. The company says the platform cuts manual work by up to 95 percent while boosting yields.
What 4Climate is building, in the end, is quietly ambitious: Indian-designed automation running food production from Gujarat to the Gulf, making climate-resilient farming something a mid-sized grower can actually afford. As the company puts it, the mission is to empower the next generation of growers to grow the best food in a sustainable way — and with every new installation, a little more of India’s food is grown by a farm that runs itself.
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