Growers have leased or bought AgZen’s “feedback optimized” smart spraying systems for almost a million acres of farmland in 2025, its second year of commercial operation, says cofounder and CEO Vishnu Jayaprakash.
Speaking to AgFunderNews at the World Agri-Tech summit in San Francisco, Jayaprakash said: “We have gone from two years ago not having a single paid acre to doing 65,000 acres in 2024, and this year we’re on 920,000 acres.”
Growers can either pay for AgZen’s RealCoverage system outright for $97,500 or sign up for a lease to own program, he said. “Our primary focus is on large row crop farms, and we’ve tried to make it as turnkey as possible, to the point where the entire installation process takes four hours.
“On the $97,500 buy price, our system on 5,000 acres of soybeans pays for itself within one season,” claimed Jayaprakash, who has just raised a $10 million Series A round.
30-50% reductions in chemical inputs
Traditional “spray and pray” approaches to applying crop inputs are increasingly being replaced with precision ag tools helping farmers apply pesticides or fertilizer exactly where they’re needed, said Jayaprakash.
But even when farmers are spraying on target, most of them still have no idea if they are spraying the right amount, or how much of the input is actually staying on the target plant and making a difference, he said.
Born out of more than a decade of research at the Varanasi research group at MIT, AgZen has two core products that directly tackle this problem.
RealCoverage is a unit stacked with cameras that can be bolted onto a sprayer and linked to a tablet in the cab to show the operator what is happening to the droplets in real time. Based on that data and the conditions at the time, the AI-powered system can tell operators how to optimize everything on the sprayer, from which nozzle to use, to pressure, boom height and droplet size, to how fast to drive and how many gallons of spray per acre (GPA) is best for a particular chemical mix on a particular crop in a specific location.
This can enable 30-50% reductions in chemical inputs, claimed Jayaprakash.
EnhanceCoverage—AgZen’s second product—is a nozzle that cloaks droplets with adjuvants (rather than simply mixing them in), dramatically increasing the likelihood they will stick to plants, enabling farmers and growers to make further reductions in chemical use, he explained.
“This really comes from our foundational understanding that we developed at the Varanasi lab at MIT of what actually makes droplets stick to plants. The challenge is you want to reduce the dynamic surface tension of droplets quickly enough before they bounce off. And conventionally, when you mix surfactants into the tank, it’s challenging for these molecules to make it to that droplet leaf interface.
“And what we found is, by cloaking these droplets, we could get around the diffusion related issues that prevent these droplets from sticking, and get the same droplet with the same adjuvant at the same rate to stick instead of bounce.”
