Ivy started with eighty plants and a spreadsheet.

Martin Bonov is a designer in Sofia with more plants than a flat should hold: a hall shelf, a bedroom, a balcony that gets the afternoon sun, a bathroom fern. The apps he tried capped the free plan at a handful of plants, nagged with streaks, and treated a balcony pilea and a bedroom calathea the same way. The spreadsheet worked, in the way spreadsheets do.

So he built the tool he wanted: one calm place that knows every plant and every room, reads the weather, learns from what you actually do, and answers questions about your plants rather than plants in general. Ivy ran on his own collection for most of a year before anyone else saw it. The eighty plants are still the test suite.

Ivy is made by KICKFLIP, a small design studio in Sofia, Bulgaria. The product is built in the open with the people who use it: there is a feedback button inside the app, and it reaches a person.