SCOTT MASSEY SELECTED CCO ANNUAL MAN-OF-YEAR
Awards Luncheon Will Held On September 20, 2024, at Baiiey’s
AUGUST 19, 2024
Scott Masser Will Receive The City-County Observer Man-Of-Year Award At The Annual Awards Luncheon on September 20 at Bally’s-Evansville
Scott Massey, co-founder & CEO of AUE™, is the middle child of Judge Thomas Aquinas Massey and artist Joanne Scott was born and raised in Evansville. He attended Christ the King Grade School, Reitz Memorial Catholic High School, and graduated from Purdue University in 2017 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering Technology and a Certificate in Entrepreneurship. In high school, Scott volunteered with the Youth Resources Teen Court program, initially considering a legal career. However, he chose engineering technology at Purdue to broaden his skills and opportunities.
In the summers of 2014-2015, Scott interned at an oil equipment manufacturing company, working on industrial fluid control systems to transport fuels. At 19, he drafted patent illustrations under a master draftsman, blending technical expertise with entrepreneurial pragmatism. Scott was later accepted into a NASA-funded research role at Purdue, focusing on energy-efficient LED lighting for indoor hydroponic cultivation. This role sought a mechanical engineer with fluid control systems expertise to design a hydroponic system for space missions, tasked with identifying more efficient methods to grow food in future space colonization.
Hydroponic technology offers significant health and environmental benefits. Unlike traditional soil-based farming, hydroponics uses up to 90% less water by recirculating nutrients in a closed system, reducing waste. Hydroponic systems eliminate the need for pesticides and herbicides, resulting in cleaner, chemical-free produce. This method also avoids preservatives, as hydroponically grown food can be harvested fresh year-round indoors, growing faster in a consistent, ideal environment, and consumed without extended shelf life treatments. By revolutionizing food production and reducing environmental impact, hydroponics has the potential to alleviate food deserts and enhance public health, even in areas like Evansville.
Despite the promise of this research, the indoor vertical farming industry was still in its infancy, with limited job opportunities due to high infrastructure, power, and labor costs. Undeterred, Scott envisioned a scalable, LED-controlled environment hydroponic-farming system that could evolve from centralized vertical farms to decentralized, rapidly deployable household and commercial units, inspired by Evansville’s history as the “refrigerator capital of the world.” He also saw potential in a recurring seed pod subscription model, similar to Keurig’s K-Cups, further leveraging the advanced polymer technology expertise of SouthWestern Indiana.
Determined to create a user-friendly home growing system, Scott designed a higher yielding, more energy efficient hydroponic appliance as easy to use as a Keurig coffee maker. He invested all his intern wages into patenting the design and built a prototype in his college apartment during his senior year in 2016. Despite exhausting his savings, Scott worked night shifts delivering newspapers and competed in pitch competitions, securing several hundred thousand dollars in awards and investments from the Purdue University Research Foundation. After graduating in the Spring of 2017, he sold the appliances from his garage with his cofounder Ivan Ball hand assembling all components, continuously improving the design based on user feedback.
Since then, Scott’s company has secured over a dozen patents in 30+ countries, received more than $2 million in federal research funding to enhance artificial intelligence control algorithms, and raised several million dollars in investment capital. Scott has also completed four tours in Africa, advising the Department of State’s Mandela Washington Fellowship on hydroponic skills training, created ten high-paying jobs in Evansville, licensed proprietary designs to commercial manufacturers in the market, was named to Indiana’s Rising 30, and Forbes 30 under 30 in 2024.
