The creator of the game “Farm Frenzy” is liquidating the unprofitable “City Greenhouses”

On November 29, Lyskovsky was appointed liquidator of Novosibirsk City Greenhouses LLC, Vertical Farms LLC and Moscow City Greenhouses Moscow LLC, data from the Unified State Register of Legal Entities shows.

Until November 2022, Lyskovsky and his partners held assets through the American iFarm. But in 2022-2023, the American company abandoned the Russian business and the shares were transferred to Lyskovsky. At the end of 2023, the total losses of the three companies exceeded 50 million rubles.

Creditor Vladimir Alekseenko posted a message in November about his plans to go to court to demand that City Greenhouses be declared bankrupt. The file of arbitration cases indicates that Lyskovsky, as part of provisional measures, was prohibited from liquidating “Vertical Farms” at the request of one of the clients for 500 thousand rubles. The Federal Tax Service has suspended operations on some “Vertical Farms” and “Moscow City Greenhouses” accounts.

City Greenhouses phone numbers are not answered. Representatives of City Greenhouses and Alexander Lyskovsky did not respond to RB.RU’s requests.

• Lyskovsky is known as the founder of computer game developer Alawar Entertainment, creator of the popular Russian games “Farm Frenzy” and “Montezuma’s Treasures.” After leaving the gaming business, the entrepreneur got involved in startups and venture capital, and then created the agritech startup iFarm, which began selling them vertical farms and software.
• The City Greenhouses company offered turnkey vertical farms in Russia for the local cultivation of vegetables, strawberries and ultra-fresh vegetables all year round, regardless of the climate and soil quality, and greenhouse software based on artificial intelligence.

The businessman started a business creating vertical farms in Russia, but later entered the international market. In June 2023, in a discussion on TheEdinorog Telegram channel, Alexander Lyskovsky responded to a question about the iFarm situation in Europe.

“Due to rising electricity prices, the number of orders for vertical farms in this region has decreased dramatically and some have been closed. But now it is gradually beginning to “thaw”: in May they “signed” the Italian client and now the contract for the Norwegian client is being “finalized.” In short, the increase in electricity prices is offset by the increase in prices of the final products of the harvest and in these two years everything in the economy has almost stabilized and customers are returning,” said the businessman.

According to him, the company focuses mainly on the Middle East and Latin American markets. The businessman did not mention the Russian businesses.

“Winter, pandemic, wars – all this does not contribute to the growth of interest in this business,” Lyskovsky said in an interview with the “Technology in Faces” channel. The businessman also noted that he had “much less money than before.”

• In 2019, iFarm received $1 million from venture fund Gagarin Capital and a group of investors. According to the Skolkovo website, Sergei Ryzhikov, CEO of 1C-Bitrix, member of the board of directors of the Russian Franchise Association and former CEO of Invitro Sergei Ambrosov, co-founder of the Atlas clinic Artem Rudi, as well as Uniscan Research invested in the company.
• In 2020, iFarm announced the closing of an investment round worth $4 million. The main investor was the venture fund Gagarin Capital, which had already invested in the project. Matrix Capital, Impulse VC, imi.vc, businessman Boris Kim and several business angels also joined the agreement. The company planned to use the funds raised to develop its iFarm Growtune IT platform.
• In 2021, the Fund for Assistance to the Development of Small Businesses in the Scientific and Technical Field awarded City Greenhouses a grant of 6 million rubles. Two years later, the Foundation tried to recover it through the courts, but sided with the businessman.

iFarm was founded in June 2017 by Alexander Lyskovsky, Maxim Chizhov and Konstantin Ulyanov. The City Greenhouses website indicates that several Russian companies have already opened their farms based on iFarm technologies (Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Miass), salad and strawberry farms are also being designed and built in other cities ( Blagoveshchensk, Kazan, Chelyabinsk). In October 2023, iFarm opened its first vertical farm in Dubai.