I caught up with Aric Olsen, president of Jain USA, are his most recent acquisition of ETWater, a weather data analytics and sprinkler control company using machine learning to measure the evapotranspiration rate of grass.
Cargill is bringing robots to its meat processing facilities in the hope of improving animal welfare, worker safety, and efficiency with a robotic cattle herder.
The round takes Bear Flag’s total funding efforts to $4.5 million after it took part in the Y Combinator accelerator and raised a pre-seed round in the fall of 2017.
The startup manufactures a plug and play device that scans and analyzes crops as a tractor moves across the field capturing 4K video data of every inch of the field.
With its sensor technology, Phenospex aims to get around the constraints of existing sensing options such as RGB and multispectral cameras, to address the over-use of chemicals and fertilizers in industrial farming.
Edete is developing a mechanical solution for pollination as an alternative to using bees.
Indoor growers say that access to capital is their biggest hurdle, according to a new report from indoor farming software company Agrilyst.
As the hype fades and more growers test out drones on their own operations, what they really want from drone-focused technology is becoming clearer and raising the bar for startups in the field.
In a comprehensive assessment of the potential for automation by McKinsey, agriculture ranked fourth with a 57% potential for automation, behind accommodation and food services (73%), manufacturing (60%), and transportation and warehousing (60%).
Nileworks claims its multi-copter drones are able to see the shape of a field and spray pesticides just 30cm above, reducing drift.
We caught up with Ally Monk, CEO of motorleaf, a few months after the business raised a $1.1m seed round of funding, to get an update on how the business is progressing.
Protix farms insects predominantly for animal and aquaculture feed, and has cracked the scalability challenge, according to new investors.
The round was led by angel investors and included Brain Robotics Capital, a fund focused on AI, robotics, and IoT.
Abundant will use the proceeds to commercialize its first product, aimed at reducing the $200 billion orchard farming industry’s reliance on seasonal labor.
Air seeding technology brought new scale and efficiencies to farming when it was first introduced, but there are several drawbacks, according to Graeme Lempriere, CEO of Clean Seed.
Further M&A activity from large agribusinesses like Jain is essential so we caught up with Observant to find out what pieces of advice the cofounder would give to farm-based agritech startups hoping to turn their businesses into acquirable companies.
A bumper week of fundings as we catch up from the holidays offer a diverse look at the types of startups innovating in the food and ag space today.
Prospera, a startup using computer vision, data science, and machine learning to monitor and analyze crops, has raised $7 million in a Series A funding round led by a leading Israeli VC.
