Member Article

Student start-up creates self-maintaining indoor garden

Basile, a revolutionary self-maintaining indoor garden, has been created by a student start-up funded by Université Paris-Saclay.

An indoor garden unlike any other, Basile manages the artificial sunlight and water needed for its produce. It plugs into the mains electricity – only needing seeds planting and a water reservoir filling every three weeks.

“The idea began because I wanted a window box, but I lived in the city and travelled too much, any plants would have just died,“ says Martin Savouré, co-founder of the Culteev start-up and creator of Basile. “So we took technology out of laboratories and made it available to the public!“

Martin wanted to create an indoor gardening system that would allow city lovers like him to have a ‘green’ corner in their home.

He credits the prototyping of the product to presenting at different student competitions.

Culteev won the Grand Jury Prize at the Paris Saclay Invest competition, giving them exposure and experience of fundraising – but Martin says that the main difficulty for a business like theirs is getting the object manufactured.

He, and his co-founder, Alexandre Aumand, are now looking for 400,000 Euros in order to go into production.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Université Paris-Saclay .