Food, refactored — from the leaf up.
Hinton Lab is a team of eighty-seven engineers, agronomists and operators rebuilding the food system the same way a software company would: in tight, observable loops, with a single platform underneath.
A farm is a controller that happens to grow food.
When Lin and Eitan met in 2020, Lin had spent four years teaching neural networks to read plant tissue from a CMOS sensor. Eitan had spent three years inside a battery-pack thermal loop. They noticed something obvious in hindsight: a hydroponic grow room is a closed-loop control system with eight inputs and one output — biomass — and nobody was treating it that way.
The first prototype was a fridge crate with a Raspberry Pi, a peristaltic pump, and a webcam looking at six basil plants. Five years later the same control loop runs on a 60,000 m² facility outside Rotterdam, on a countertop in Brooklyn, and on every node in between — same code, same recipes, same brain.
The next trillion-dollar food company will not own land. It will own the operating system that runs on someone else's roof.
Four rules we hire against.
Atoms before adjectives
We ship hardware. The product is the produce on your plate, not the deck on a partner's screen.
Loops, not lines
Energy, water, nutrients, biomass — every input is a candidate to recover. We design for the return trip first.
One farm, every farm
What the OS learns at a Brooklyn countertop sharpens a Rotterdam Tower. Knowledge compounds across the network.
Calm engineering
A farm should not page its operator. We measure success by how little the operator has to do.
The people signing the work.
Stanford CS · ex-DeepMind plant ML lead. Built the first neural model for chlorophyll-by-pixel inference.
MIT Mech-E · early Tesla battery thermal team. Designs the recirculating climate that lets a Bay run silent at 28 dB.
Wageningen PhD · 15 years at Bayer Crop Science. Curates the recipe library and oversees the seed bank.
Ex-Brex platform. Owns Verdant OS — the brain that runs every farm we ship.
Built and ran the Rotterdam fulfillment hub. Now scales install + service to 40 EU cities.
Was a Tower customer before joining. Leads the agronomist-on-call program for commercial accounts.