Precision crop management agtech company Orchard Robotics says it raised $22 million in a recent oversubscribed Series A funding round led by Quiet Capital and Shine Capital.
The company also says it has continued participation from General Catalyst, Contrary, Mythos, Valyrian, Ravelin and other investors such as F1 World Champion Nico Rosberg and Yext & Roam founder Howard Lerman.
With this funding round, Orchard Robotics founder Charlie Wu says he hopes to continue to expand on the data collected to better help growers in the future.
“That’s what we want to do, be able to give the most valuable information and the most integration of that information, so that growers can not only see everything they want to see and even more, but then also be able to use that data effectively in what they’re doing day to day,” he says.
Wu says he grew up in a farming family, and as he studied computer science at Cornell University, he realized growers have a strong need for good data.
“This lack of data is still a huge problem across the largest specialty crop farms,” he says.
Wu has expanded offices in Washington and California to better serve a growing number of crops including apples, grapes, blueberries and cherries as well as expanding into almonds, pistachios, citrus and strawberries.
“Our mission is just to help as many of our farmers as we can,” he says. “Scaling up, both the number of systems we have in the field, the number of farms we work on scaling up within our current farms, always just developing like new features for our growers. The thing about the camera system is that we’re capturing all of this data and we probably only scratch the surface — 10[%] or 20% of what we actually extract out of that data.”
Wu says since founding the company in 2022, he’s seen how valuable actionable data that the tractor-mounted FruitScope Vision System has been able to capture using artificial intelligence to analyze every visible detail of each tree, vine or plant.
“Our camera systems are able to basically capture anything the human eye can see,” he says. “What that means typically is like fruit counts, sizes, colors, disease detection on the fruit of the tree itself, measuring things like canopy area, fruit growth rate, getting yield estimates, size projection, measuring things like the tree trunk size, the height of the trees, inventories of where all the trees are. Anything that you would be able to see with the human eye, we can train our state-of-the-art AI models that run onboard the camera to be able to look for and basically get this data for growers accurately, but also at a large scale.”
And Wu says that, in turn, saves growers time and money and helps growers make better decisions on how to hire for harvest, how to market and sell the crop growing as well as save on labor and input costs with Orchard Robotics’ Vault and operating system.
“We can get it at a very granular level, down to the tree-by-tree level, but even having it at a general level, it is super valuable for our growers, because they’re able to make a lot better decisions based on that and end up with them becoming more efficient and then being more profitable overall,” he says.
