Exclusive: Israel’s SeeTree banks $17.5m to expand its ‘tree intelligence’ platform for orchards and forests

• Israel-based “tree intelligence platform” SeeTree has raised a $17.5 million Series C round.
• New investors HSBC Asset Management and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) jointly led the round.
• Additional new investors OurCrowd and SmartAgro also participated along with existing investors Hanaco Ventures, Mindest Ventures, Wave-founder Uri Levine’s The Founders Kitchen, Orbia Ventures and Citrosuco.
• Series C funding will enable SeeTree to expand the crop types that work with its intelligence platform; the company will also expand in “key” territories including Latin America, North America, Ukraine and Asia-Pacific.

Digitizing a ‘lose lose lose’ situation

Founded in 2017 by former intelligence officers and entrepreneurs, SeeTree digitizes the process of monitoring tree health for orchards and forests.

Historically, growers  have sent human scouts into the field to assess tree health, a process that also requires sending samples to labs and lots of manual data input. Depending on the size of the operation, this process can apply to millions of trees over thousands of hectares.

Israel Talpaz, CEO of SeeTree, says his company’s main goal is to address this lack of digitization of field data.

“This [lack of technology] means that valuable resources such as manpower, water, and chemicals are wasted and tree productivity (for food and timber, for example) is far from its potential,” he explains to AgFunderNews. “Growers lose profits, we gain less food, and the environment is affected in a negative way. This is a lose, lose, lose situation.”

SeeTree provides a platform that includes military-grade drones, ground sensors, artificial intelligence, multi-spectral imaging and in-field data collection.

“We have developed intellectual property and specialize in utilizing machine-learning AI and computer vision technologies that enable us to precisely digitize and analyze trees, per every tree and at a large scale, thus creating an affordable ‘tree operating system’ for growers worldwide,” says Talpaz.

Orchards and forestry operations can use the insights from these technologies to assess tree health faster and more accurately. The system administers a health score for each tree, can identify underperforming trees, and track a host of other aspects that could impact operations.

“Tree-centric data and digitization are creating a transformation of tree farming,” notes Talpaz. “SeeTree’s mission is to assist growers of trees in optimizing their tree crops by providing them with an end-to-end data-driven service and products that enable them to increase the efficiency of their operations and the productivity of their trees over time.”

400 million trees and counting

To date, SeeTree has raised more than $60 million and has operations in Brazil, USA, Mexico and South Africa, along with a development center in the Ukraine.

“We are managing about 400 million trees – about 1,000,000 acres around the world,” says Talpaz.

Pasha Romanovski, founding partner at Hanaco Ventures, which led SeeTree’s Series A, calls the company “a leading authority in tree intelligence.”

“Since our initial investment in SeeTree, we’ve witnessed the company’s progress in fulfilling its vision to become the holistic farmers’ management platform, facilitating the management of over 400 million trees worldwide,” he noted in a statement. 

Current crops that work with the SeeTree platform include citrus, palms, eucalyptus, and, avocado, along with forests.

Series C funding will fuel the company’s expansion to new crops as well as new regions poised to benefit from the digitization of their tree operations.