March 11, 2019

Omnivore Partners, Blume Ventures, and BEENEXT have led a $2 million Seed Round for Indian agtech and robotics platform TartanSense.

Additional investors participating in the round include Dileep George, co-founder of Vicarious AI, which is backed by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos; Akash Gupta and Samay Kohli, co-founders of GreyOrange, and Kush Jawahar from Featherlite.

TartanSense was founded in Bengaluru in 2015 by Jaisimha Rao, who while working on his family’s coffee plantation, recognized a lack of data-driven decision making in-the-field.

To bridge this gap, TartanSense is a developer of small agricultural robots. Using AI-assisted computer vision and robotics the company builds precision sprayers for the control of weeds, insects, and diseases.

“AI and robotics offer the opportunity for Indian agriculture to leapfrog into the future, bypassing legacy technologies,” said Mark Khan, managing partner, Omnivore Partners.

Although India is home to the second largest area of arable farmland in the world at 157.35 million acres, it is highly fragmented among smallholders, with 86 percent of this land held in measures of less than two hectares. However, this fact also represents significant potential for scalability.

“We are firm believers that Indian deeptech can scale globally, and there are limitless possibilities for agricultural applications,” said Karthik Reddy, managing partner at Blume Ventures

Understanding this, Jaisimha, who holds a BS in Computer and Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and spent six years with BlackRock managing portfolios of securitized products, states that affordable and portable farming robots are particularly helpful in offering AI, robotics, and computer vision to farmers with limited landholdings.

“We are democratizing technology to small farm holders that has historically been available to large farms in the west by focusing on affordability and portability,” said Rao, who notes that TartanSense’s technology can improve India’s farming economies by a factor of 10.

The company plans to use the capital from this raising to back the scaling up of its first product, BrijBot, a robotic weed spraying solution for smallholder cotton farmers, with the potential to reduce weeds by up to 70 percent. Future plans include adding the ability for automated harvesting.

“While the global AgriTech sector has seen multiple robotics startups, including Blue River Technology which was acquired by John Deere, TartanSense is the first Indian agritech startup focused on robotics,” said Khan.“Omnivore is proud to support TartanSense as they bring the AI and robotics revolutions to India’s smallholder farmers.”

As horticultural production in the country hit a record 300 million tons for fiscal year 2016/2017, Rao is not alone in pursuing the application of robotics to production and harvesting in India.

Tech entrepreneur turned farmer, Manohar Sambandam is behind Green Robot, a robotics platform, also based in Bengaluru, for the harvesting of cotton. Likewise, Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd.‘s farm equipment division has partnered with Virginia Tech on the development of a robot for the harvesting of table grapes.

-Lynda Kiernan