An Entrepreneurial Green Thumb

Mba Student Fredrik Lindseth Is Working On Automated Indoor System To Help Gardeners Grow Vegetables And Herbs At Home

In 2013, Fredrik Lindseth, MBA ’26, had just founded a small aquaponics farming business in Colorado when a local grocer asked him to set up a hydroponics installation in the store to show customers how food is grown. As he was working, customers repeatedly asked him if he could build a similar one in their homes so they could grow some of their own food year-round.

He began installing these custom systems but soon realized that the management of an indoor garden was difficult for many people. “I would receive the same questions day in and day out about when they needed to add nutrients or balance the pH of their water, etc.,” he said. Lindseth, who was studying biology with an emphasis on plants at Colorado College, thought there had to be a way to help with the maintenance that customers found most challenging.

That’s when he founded Avid, the hydroponics technology company behind a modular indoor gardening container for growing fresh produce at home. It uses automated, app-controlled systems to monitor and control the environment that plants grow in.

“In the early days of Avid, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. I came from a science background, so the idea of creating a financial model, marketing strategy, and prototype was all very foreign to me,” he said.

After proving the concept was viable, Lindseth recruited industrial design and engineering partners, who both invested in his first product. He had raised $1 million and was in Shenzhen, China, in December 2019 working with his engineers to get his beta units back to the U.S. for nationwide testing.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. So he spent 2020 and 2021 working with beta testers, gathering feedback, and making adjustments. In 2022, with the product ready for the market, he went out to raise the $5 million needed for mass production but ran into economic headwinds.

In 2023 Lindseth pivoted and started looking for a less capital-
intensive way to generate revenue for Avid, including leveraging some of its intellectual property. “That same year, I decided to apply to the McCombs School of Business, hoping to study for an MBA and find the resources at UT that would help me be better prepared to raise the funds I need for that new product,” he said.

At McCombs, the Brumley Institute for Graduate Entrepreneurship has been amazing to work with, Lindseth said. “I would say the professors have been a huge help as well. They have always been willing to sit down with me and help me think through how I can best apply their course work to different aspects of my business plan,” he said. 

Perseverance is also key, Lindseth said. Since coming to McCombs, he has been working on a new concept that turns his product into a modular, automated shelf garden focused on the production of leafy greens, herbs, and other vegetables, he said.

“I am currently raising a round of funding to advance our new modular shelf garden into mass production, so I will be working on that after graduation. We then hope to use that as a launching pad for a much larger family of automated gardening products, with the goal of helping anyone grow their own perfect garden no matter where they live or how green of a thumb they possess.”