Grow bountiful
mushrooms at home.
The first standalone mushroom cultivation appliance designed for meaningful food production. Intelligent enough to guide you, beautiful enough to display proudly, and honest enough to be fully unlocked and easily repairable. Welcome to the world, Cultivar.
15 minutes per week.
Fresh mushrooms whenever.
Fresh gourmet mushrooms don't keep. They're meant to be eaten within a day or two of harvest, at peak flavor and nutrition. Growing your own is the only way to get that quality on your schedule. Cultivar was designed from the ground up to make at-home mushroom cultivation more intuitive than you'd ever think possible.
Form follows function.
Here they agree.
Growing mushrooms at home has long been possible. We have done it in closets and basements and grow tents for decades. What's been missing is a system that turns the vigilance of cultivation into a beautiful, quiet ritual. Cultivar tends the mycology. You tend the Cultivar. The mushrooms, in time, nurture you.
The world's best
Mushroom hardware.
Every one of Cultivar's sensors and systems exists to tend mycology while keeping you in the loop.
Breathe easy.
Cultivar is a tidy roommate.
Cultivar's intake and exhaust pass through H11 HEPA filters rated to capture 95% of particles at 0.3 microns. Grow anything, anywhere while knowing your air stays clean.
Cultivar cleanup is engineered to be simple. Grow surfaces wipe sterile in seconds with isopropyl alcohol and the humidifier reservoir is removable and fully dishwasher safe.
Scan the bag.
Skip the logbook.
Every Cultivar grow bag has a printed BagTag code. When you put the bag in Cultivar, it's camera scans it and automatically knows what's inside — species, recipe, timing, everything. From that moment on, every bag is tracked automatically. No labels, no guesswork, no spreadsheets, no logbook.
The fifth kingdom.
Your way.
Two choices, fully independent. How much substrate work do you want to do? And do you want us to handle your genetics this month, or do you want to source your own? Mix and match. Change your mind. There's no wrong answer. Just the grow that fits your life this month.
- 9x 3lb BagTag grow bags, pre-mixed and pre-sterilized
- Ready to inject (no prep, no sterilization)
- ~15 min/week
- Grow ~8-12 lbs of mushrooms per month
- 12x empty BagTag grow bags
- Mix and sterilize your own substrate using our recipes or your own
- Requires a home pressure cooker
- Grow ~12-16 lbs of mushrooms per month
- Use any bags, substrate, and cultures you already have
- Print your own BagTags
- Labels need to survive 95% RH. Apply after sterilization using waterproof stock.
- 3x 10ml syringes — enough to inoculate 9-12 bags
- Rotating selection based on seasonality and what's thriving in our lab
- Living mycelium in nutrient solution, ready to inject
- Source liquid cultures, agar plates, or grain spawn from any lab or supplier
- Any species, any genetics
Every key part
repairable.
Every replaceable part has published specs, standard connectors, and no proprietary lock-in. A worn-out component should never mean a trip to the landfill.
Your grow works
without us.
Cultivar runs on your home WiFi and works with any phone, tablet, or laptop. It doesn't require an app store, user account, internet connection, or software subscription to keep working. The only cloud you need is the humidity in the fruiting chamber.
Grow logs, timelapses, settings, recipes — everything lives on Cultivar locally. Nothing leaves unless you choose to share it. And the full software stack is MIT-licensed open source. If Grove5 disappears tomorrow, Cultivar keeps growing.
A serious protein source.
Mushrooms are one of the most resource-efficient foods that we know how to grow. They are also good for you.
What one Cultivar does in a year.
Estimates assume Cultivar running near its maximum capacity — 12 to 16 lbs of fresh mushrooms per month — and the harvest replacing beef of equivalent protein content.
Figures use conservative midpoints from published lifecycle assessments (Poore & Nemecek 2018, Mekonnen & Hoekstra 2012, FAO LEAP). They assume Cultivar's harvest replaces beef of equivalent protein content. Actual impact depends on your diet.
Join the first
harvest.
The first batch of Cultivars will ship to a select group of founding growers. Join the waitlist and we'll let you know as soon as units are ready.
No commitment · we'll notify you when your unit is ready
We will be in touch when the first units are almost ready. You're among the first on the waitlist, and we're excited you're here.
Waitlist signups signal demand, allowing us to commit engineering resources and prioritize community features.
From prototype to production.
Hardware moves at the speed of physics, supply chains, and team size. Grove5 is a small, self-funded operation. Dates will shift, but we'll keep you posted along the way.
-
Design for prototypingComponent selection, schematics, PCB layout, mechanical CAD, firmware bring-up, and BoM lock for V0.1. The architecture is settled and the bench work is wrapping up.
-
2Prototype V0.1 — research platformCustom SMD PCBs already designed and assembled in-house. V0.1 is built for learning, not looks: over-instrumented with extra sensors and probe points so we can characterize the biology end-to-end with climate response curves, colonization signatures, fruiting triggers, and the software control loops that tie them together. Internal grows running around the clock to feed and finetune the vision & grow models.
-
3Prototype V0.2 — integration & optimizationThe biology lessons from V0.1 turn into a product. Sensor stack trimmed to what's actually needed, PCB consolidated, mechanical refined, firmware tightened, and the climate/vision/control loops tuned for repeatable performance. The unit that behaves like a Cultivar before we tool for one.
-
4Design for productionTranslate the prototypes into something a factory can build repeatably. DFM revisions, supplier shortlist locked, tolerances tightened, and a service manual drafted alongside the assembly drawings.
-
5Tooling & first articlesInjection molds cut, sheet-metal dies made, assembly fixtures built. First parts off real tooling get inspected and dimensioned. The slow, expensive nailbiting phase nobody talks about. And the one that decides whether the rest of the schedule holds.
-
6Engineering validation (EVT)First small build of units assembled entirely from production-intent parts and processes. Verify the design survives the factory: fit, finish, yields, and the things prototypes politely hid. Pre-compliance testing begins in parallel.
-
7Pilot batch & certifications (DVT)A larger pilot run validates the manufacturing process at scale. Full electrical safety (UL/ETL), wireless (FCC/CE/IC), and EMC certification. Long-haul beta units placed with real households so we catch what the lab can't.
-
8Founding growers shipThe first production run goes out to waitlist members. Whatever we learn becomes the V1.1 revision and an open service manual.
Hardware schedules slip. We'll be honest about it when it happens and the waitlist will hear first.