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Fifth Season LLC, a shuttered vertical farming and robotics startup, has officially filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation.
The filing, dated Oct. 23, came a week before the one-year mark of when executives at the South Side-based company told employees that the firm would be ceasing operations. Almost all of the roughly 100 workers it employed were subsequently laid off while the company's executives got replaced a few weeks later by a small team led by Chief Restructuring Officer Michael Von Lehman, who is also the president of Bellevue-based business consulting firm Meridian Management Partners.
Von Lehman, who had been tasked with trying to get the company's assets to turn a new leaf via a possible acquisition by another firm or otherwise, is listed on one of the Chapter 7 filings as the authorized representative of the company. He did not respond to requests for comment as of the publication of this article.
According to a filing with the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the company estimated its asset value ranges between $50,001 and $100,000. Its liabilities are estimated to be between $10,000,001 and $50 million.
Nearly 200 creditors are listed on the filing, among them Duquesne Light Co., Jordan Tax Service Inc., Michigan State University, PGT Trucking, Reed Smith LLP and UPMC Health Plan.
Before its shuttering, Fifth Season employed most of its workers out of its headquarters in The Highline building, while others worked out of its 60,000-square-foot indoor farming facility in Braddock. Commercial real estate firm CBRE Inc. began marketing the former Fifth Season indoor farming facility for lease in June 2023.
Fifth Season raised over $75 million in outside investments and churned out about 500,000 pounds of leafy greens annually at its heavily automated Braddock farm, shipping fresh spinach and lettuce varieties to hundreds of stores across the multi-state region owned by retail customers like Giant Eagle Inc. and The Kroger Co., among others.
Its shuttering came as a shock to Pittsburgh's tech startup community and its robotics ecosystem last fall, which just days prior experienced the shuttering of autonomous vehicle developer Argo AI LLC. The founders of that firm have since launched a new autonomous vehicle venture focused on the trucking industry called Stack AV.