Iron Ox

aid: iron-ox
name: Iron Ox
image: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/15058167?v=4
description: 'Iron Ox (legally Inevitable Tech, Inc.) was a San Carlos, California robotics company that built autonomous
  indoor farms — hydroponic greenhouses worked by mobile transport robots and a robotic arm that seeded, moved, imaged and
  harvested leafy greens and herbs, with machine learning used to spot pests and disease plant by plant. Founded in 2015 by
  Brandon Alexander and Jon Binney, it went through Y Combinator (W16), raised roughly $98 million in total including a $53
  million Series C led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures in September 2021, and ran greenhouses in Gilroy, California and Lockhart,
  Texas. It cut about half its staff — roughly 50 people — in November 2022 and ceased operations in mid-2023. Iron Ox never
  ran a developer program: it sold produce, not software, and the only public code it ever shipped was internal ROS robotics
  tooling on GitHub. Its site, ironox.com, is now a GoDaddy parking lander and every developer subdomain has been removed
  from DNS, so there is no API, specification, SDK or documentation surface left to profile.'
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/iron-ox/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
x-type: company
x-source: harvest:secondary-market
x-harvest-source: https://forgeglobal.com/iron-ox_stock/
x-tier: no-public-api
x-tier-reason: defunct-no-api-surface
x-status: defunct
x-defunct:
  legal_name: Inevitable Tech, Inc.
  founded: '2015'
  founders:
  - Brandon Alexander
  - Jon Binney
  accelerator: Y Combinator (W16)
  headquarters: San Carlos, California, United States
  facilities:
  - Gilroy, California (robotic greenhouse)
  - Lockhart, Texas (535,000 sq ft greenhouse)
  total_funding_usd: 98000000
  last_round:
    stage: Series C
    amount_usd: 53000000
    date: 2021-09
    lead: Breakthrough Energy Ventures
  layoffs:
    date: 2022-11
    headcount: 50
    note: approximately half of staff
  ceased: '2023'
  ceased_precision: month-unknown
  ceased_evidence: Last substantive Wayback capture of ironox.com is 2023-05-12 (14,584 bytes); the host was returning 404
    by 2023-08-12 and had no captures at all between 2023-10 and 2024-03. Y Combinator's company directory lists the company
    as "Inactive". Crunchbase records the organization as permanently closed.
  disposition: No acquirer identified. The Lockhart, Texas facility was sold and was being re-tenanted as of late 2024. The
    ironox.com domain has been re-registered through a GoDaddy reseller and is parked for sale.
x-probe:
  date: '2026-08-23'
  method: probed
  findings:
  - host: ironox.com
    http_status: 200
    note: GoDaddy parking lander. Every path returns an identical 114-byte HTML redirect to /lander (window.LANDER_SYSTEM="PW",
      _trfd ap:"parking"; nameservers ns71/ns72.domaincontrol.com). All 200s are soft-404s — no OpenAPI, Swagger, GraphQL,
      apis.json, agent card or .well-known document is actually served. The /llms.txt and /robots.txt it answers with are
      GoDaddy parking boilerplate whose sitemap contains only /lander; they are not Iron Ox artifacts and are not saved.
  - host: api.ironox.com
    http_status: 0
    note: NXDOMAIN
  - host: docs.ironox.com
    http_status: 0
    note: NXDOMAIN
  - host: developer.ironox.com
    http_status: 0
    note: NXDOMAIN
  - host: support.ironox.com
    http_status: 0
    note: NXDOMAIN — Zendesk help center linked from the 2023 site, DNS removed
  - host: github.com/iron-ox
    http_status: 200
    note: Genuine Iron Ox GitHub organization (name "Iron Ox", blog http://ironox.com, created 2015-10-10, avatar is the Iron
      Ox seedling logo). 47 public repos, 42 of them forks of ROS-Industrial / MoveIt / Cartographer / vendor camera and arm
      drivers. The five first-party repos are ROS packages for internal robot control, not a product API contract. Last push
      2022.
  - host: iron-ox.com
    http_status: 200
    note: NOT this company — "Iron Ox Physical Culture", a Chinese martial arts and Indo-Persian physical culture school in
      San Diego, California. Namesake only; deliberately not wired as a pointer.
  - host: inevitabletech.com
    http_status: 202
    note: NOT this company, despite Y Combinator's directory listing it as Iron Ox's website. Wayback shows the domain serving
      an unrelated offshore software development / mobile app agency continuously from 2011 through 2024; it is now behind
      a SiteGround captcha challenge. The YC link is stale. Deliberately not wired as a pointer (STEP 0c ownership check).
  conclusion: No operating host, no developer portal, no API, no machine-readable contract of any kind (OpenAPI, AsyncAPI,
    GraphQL SDL, MCP, A2A agent card, .proto, WSDL), and no first-party package in npm, PyPI, RubyGems or crates.io.
specificationVersion: '0.23'
created: '2026-08-23'
modified: '2026-08-23'
tags:
- Company
- Agriculture
- AgTech
- Robotics
- Automation
- Indoor Farming
- Controlled Environment Agriculture
- Machine Learning
- Climate Tech
- Defunct
apis: []
common:
- type: GitHubOrganization
  name: Iron Ox on GitHub
  url: https://github.com/iron-ox
- type: CompanyProfile
  name: Y Combinator — Inevitable Tech (Iron Ox), W16
  url: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/iron-ox
- type: Press
  name: TechCrunch — Robotic farming firm Iron Ox raises $53M (2021)
  url: https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/23/robotic-farming-firm-iron-ox-raises-53m/
- type: Press
  name: CNBC — Iron Ox is disrupting agriculture with robots and AI (2022)
  url: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/18/iron-ox-is-disrupting-agriculture-with-robots-and-ai.html
- type: Press
  name: TechCrunch — Iron Ox lays off 50, nearly half its staff (2022)
  url: https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/03/iron-ox-lays-off-50-amounting-to-nearly-half-its-staff/
- type: Press
  name: The Robot Report — Reports of layoffs at Iron Ox (2022)
  url: https://www.therobotreport.com/reports-of-layoffs-at-iron-ox/
- type: Press
  name: AgFunderNews — Another blow for indoor farm robotics as Iron Ox lays off nearly half its staff
  url: https://agfundernews.com/another-blow-for-indoor-farm-robotics-as-iron-ox-lays-off-nearly-half-its-staff
- type: WellKnownProbe
  name: .well-known probe (all paths soft-404 on a parked host)
  url: well-known/iron-ox-well-known.yml
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: kin@apievangelist.com
- FN: APIs.json
  email: info@apis.io
x-enrichment:
  date: '2026-08-23'
  status: minimal
  artifacts_added: 1
  pass: local-v1
x-coverage:
  state: none
  reason: defunct
  detail: Iron Ox ceased operations in mid-2023 and ironox.com is now a GoDaddy parking lander that answers HTTP 200 with
    the same 114-byte redirect to /lander for every path, including /openapi.json and every /.well-known/ document.
  evidence:
  - url: https://ironox.com/
    status: 200
  - url: https://ironox.com/openapi.json
    status: 200
  - url: https://ironox.com/.well-known/agent-card.json
    status: 200
  - url: https://api.ironox.com/
    status: 0
  - url: http://web.archive.org/web/20230812090055/https://ironox.com/
    status: 404
  - url: https://github.com/iron-ox
    status: 200
  checked: '2026-08-23'