Yahoo Finance Naturethings: Marrying AI and greenery in urban spaces
Naturethings’ head of design Kenneth Lim and founder & CEO Nalini Veeraghanta (Photo: Samuel Isaac Chua/EdgeProp Singapore)
During Covid, when people predominantly worked from home, fourth-generation gardener Nalini Veeraghanta saw a renewed appreciation for nature and the outdoors. However, while most people say they love plants, they claim they do not have time to care for them or have a green thumb.
“Plants are living things. It’s not like a piece of furniture where we can put it in a corner and be done with it,” says Veeraghanta. “We discovered that service and maintenance were the two biggest bugbears for most people.”
She founded Naturethings amid Covid in April 2021 as a “nature-as-a-service” platform to help clients care for and maintain their plants. The platform uses services supported by artificial intelligence (AI) to cater to the needs of end-users in urban settings.
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A WhatsApp chatbot would give regular check-ups and health scans of the plants. Naturethings also added programmes that built daily habits around interacting with green spaces.
From there, Naturethings evolved into an online marketplace to enable people to shop for goods and services related to plants and plant care, including expert advice on plant maintenance and design consultation via WhatsApp video calls. Given the community of over 15,000 followers and active users of the platform, the AI was able to learn fast.
Founding team
When the clients of Naturethings returned to the office after Covid restrictions were lifted, there was an increased demand from corporates to introduce green spaces into their offices. That laid the foundation for the current iteration of Naturethings’ B2B (business-to-business) platform.
As Naturethings evolved, others became convinced of its business model and joined the company. One of the first to join the founding team was Ashwin Dhanasri, Veeraghanta’s college friend from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University. Based in Hyderabad, India, Dhanasari joined the company as CTO in 2021, and is building the digital twin technology for Naturethings.
Veeraghanta’s brother, Pavan Veeraghanta, a construction and sustainability leader in the UAE, was initially an adviser to the company as it moved into the commercial real estate space. Based in Dubai, he has been involved in 150 construction and real estate services projects, the latest being Dubai’s Museum of the Future. To build the operations and sustainability charter, he quit his full-time job to join Naturethings as COO in 2022. While he continues to be based in Dubai, he has set up a secondary base in Singapore.
Last year, when Naturethings moved upstream from maintenance to landscape design, Veeraghanta was introduced to Kenneth Lim, a Singaporean tech professional and self-taught landscape designer and horticulturist.
Lim founded SyncScape in 2007 to undertake landscape design projects. Since then, he has designed the gardens of over 100 houses across Singapore, from terraced houses to Good Class Bungalows. “Doing such projects energises me,” he says. “There’s a spiritual side to plants because there’s a connection between humans and plants.”
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Bridge between tech and nature
For the last 27 years, Lim has been working in the tech sector. “Traditionally, people in horticulture know little about tech, and people in tech know little about plants. I’m the natural bridge between the tech and natural worlds.”
He has found the right fit in Naturethings, where he came on board as the latest member of the founding team and the head of design in 2023. Before, Lim was already a consultant for corporate clients on landscaping issues, but on an ad hoc basis. A particular 314-room, 27-storey hotel downtown was completed in 2016, and the owner was concerned that the green façade looked patchy even after several years. Lim was brought in as a consultant.
When inspecting the property, he immediately saw the issue: the intervals between the planter boxes for the facade grilles were too wide. Lim’s solution was to insert additional planter box layers of green in between, so instead of intervals of four levels, it was every two levels. The previous variety of plants grew downwards instead of upwards, creating these bald patches. He, therefore, chose plants that climbed upwards. The result? “The façade is now very green,” declares Lim. “It’s no longer patchy.”
Generational gardeners
Lim has also found a kindred spirit in Veeraghanta, as their interest in plants and gardens was passed through the generations: Lim’s through his grandfather and father, and Veeraghanta’s through her great-grandmother and grandmothers.
Veeraghanta’s great-grandmother had a PhD in Botany and recently passed away at 103. Her maternal grandmother was an urban farmer who “cooked using everything she grew in her garden”.
Her paternal grandmother had a vast garden, and her interest lay in flowers, specifically those associated with religious rituals. “Her house was always open, so people could come in and pluck the flowers from her garden for those rituals,” recalls Veeraghanta. “It was like a neighbourhood community gathering place.”
However, Veeraghanta followed a different path. After she graduated from business school in India, she took up leadership roles at multinational companies such as Procter & Gamble, Tata Group and lastly, LVMH’s Moët Hennessy Diageo in 2017. She was initially based in Jakarta but later relocated to Kuala Lumpur. After over two years with the French multinational firm, she left and moved to Singapore in January 2020, at the start of Covid.
In July 2020, she was selected to join Antler as an “entrepreneur in residence”. She had made a pitch to Antler on a version of Naturethings, and after several iterations, she met some of her early ex-founder friends. But her idea for the business has evolved since then.
Digital twin technology
Naturethings has been engaged to provide landscaping and biophilic design in the offices of a Fortune 500 corporate real estate services firm in Paya Lebar Quarter (PLQ) Tower 3 and at Six Battery Road in Singapore. As these are actual workplaces, “the users’ primary goal is not to come in and admire the greenery”, says Veeraghanta. “We want to understand how greenery can contribute to productivity and the corporate ESG goals.”
The firm created a digital twin of the office spaces for the corporate client. The plants were also installed with sensors. A digital twin replicates what is happening on the physical site, and the model is helpful, as clients can monitor everything on their dashboard, says Veeraghanta. “We can already track the density and biodiversity on the site.”
Using the digital twin of the space, Naturethings was able to “deploy optimal evidence-based green solutions at each of the eight zones [of the office at PLQ3], bringing in a high degree of confidence in managing the maintenance via sensors linked to the AI models”, she adds.
The most significant change is in the communal area, where the low set of plants behind the sofa seats have been removed and deployed elsewhere. Instead, there are now corners with a profusion of plants.
Naturethings has also created seasonality in the eight zones of the office. “The office occupants will be able to feel the innate changes in mood and vibrancy coming from how the plants and trees change with the seasons,” says Veeraghanta.
Over time, the AI will be able to capture spatial data and augment human action in terms of the maintenance of the plants. She adds: “In the future, our clients can leave the monitoring and tracking of plant health to us, and focus on managing the overall health of their spaces and the well-being of their employees.”
Hospitality sector
Beyond the commercial space, Veeraghanta also sees potential for such greening in the hospitality sector. Lucrum Capital is in talks with Naturethings to pilot its digital twin technology to manage and optimise the maintenance of the green spaces in the upcoming 115-room Mama Shelter Singapore hotel. Naturethings will also manage the urban farm on the roof- top, including experiences such as farm-to-table and farm-to-bar concepts.
Naturethings was the Start-up winner of the Insead Business as a Force for Good Award 2024. “As a tech company, we are a pioneer in urban nature-based solutions,” says Veeraghanta. “We see our role as enabling a dated, fragmented industry of biophilic design and landscaping to leapfrog into the 21st century."
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