Christian Haaramäki
CEO & Product Design, Co-founder
Our story
Three years,
one frustration.
Vext started in a kitchen in Espoo with a frustration most home cooks know. Supermarket basil that goes brown before the week is out. Windowsill herbs that die before you need them again. And the ones that survive taste like the plastic they came in.
Why we built Vext
Christian likes cooking, but the ingredients kept letting him down.
He cooked most nights. Pasta with basil and tomatoes. Eggs with herbs from a windowsill pot that lasted two weeks before dying. Good cooking starts with good ingredients. His kept wilting before he could use them
Growing your own should have been the answer. It wasn't. The supermarket pots died within a week. The hydroponic kits looked like lab equipment and took up the whole counter. The smart gardens were too small to make a real difference at the table.
So he started building one.
Vext 1.0s, Espoo, 2024Three years, thirty-plus upgrades
What it took to make one smart garden worth owning.
The first prototype lived in our 9 m² office in Espoo. It leaked water, the lights were weak, the door kept falling off, and the electronics were swimming in water. Each version after that fixed something the last one missed, across hundreds of small iterations.
Vext 2.0 is what we shipped after running over 20 hand-built cabinets in real European homes. We are still finding small things to improve, and we will. That is the work.
3 years
In development
30+
Major upgrades
20+
1.0 cabinets, built by hand
The three of us
Three childhood friends.
We grew up together. Three years of late nights and strong opinions about a cabinet. We are still at it.
Vincent Långström
Hardware & Software Engineer, Co-founder
Niklas Bärlund
Co-founder
Where the name comes from
Växt
Vext
växt — plant
tillväxt — growth
We grew up speaking Swedish in Finland. Växt means plant. Tillväxt means growth. Swap the ä for an e and you keep the meaning, lose the umlaut, and end up with a name that works in every language we ship to.
What we built
A cabinet that grows fresh food.
Year-round. At home.
Designed in Espoo. Shipping across Europe. Batch 3 ships October 2026.