April 2, 2024

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

Tech-enabled precision crop management startup Orchard Robotics has gained $3.8 million in funding from a Pre-Seed round led by Contrary and an oversubscribed Seed round led by General Catalyst with participation from Humba Ventures, Soma Capital, Correlation Ventures, VU Venture Partners, Genius Ventures, along with angel investors Howard Lerman, Joshua Browder, Rory and Kieran O’Reilly, and many others.

“Orchard Robotics has a bold vision to transform the future of farming and bring digitization and automation to farms,” said Niko Bonatsos, managing director, and Max Rimpel, partner, General Catalyst. “The experience of the team, early success with large customers, partnership approach, and their data-first platform stood out to us, and we look forward to helping the company modernize a legacy industry for the fruit industry and beyond.”

Founded at Cornell University by company CEO Charles Wu, Orchard Robotics provides precision crop management for fruit farmers through a vehicle-mounted, AI-powered vision system that gathers data including fruit size, count, color, growth rate, and more, about the fruit on each individual tree.

“Our mission at Orchard Robotics is to help farmers produce more food for the world, more profitability, efficiently, and sustainably,” said Wu. “This starts with giving farmers the precision data they need to do what they do best.”

Despite orchards often having up to millions of trees across thousands of acres growing hundreds of millions of fruit, farmers have historically been in the position of having to rely on small and imprecise sample sizes, for instance, counting the fruit on only 10 trees out of a 10,000-tree block to make critical crop management decisions.

Each tree is a unique, living thing, needing specific inputs, treatments, and care throughout the entire season to produce the best, high-quality crops. Using today’s imprecise practices and homogenous treatments leads to inefficient resource usage, higher labor costs, and the potential for significant crop loss and value. 

Currently, Orchard Robotics’ technology is being used by many of the largest U.S. fruit growers, aiding farmers in precision pruning, thinning, and spraying for targeted crop load management that ensures each tree gets what it needs to thrive.

“Growing better fruit begins with knowing what you’re growing,” said Wu. “Nearly every decision on the farm, from pruning to spraying to thinning, is made in an effort to maximize fruit yield and quality.”

“Our cameras image trees from bud to bloom to harvest, and use advanced computer vision and machine learning models we’ve developed to collect precise data about hundreds of millions of fruit.”

Wu continued, “This is a monumental step forward from traditional methods, which rely on manually-collected samples of maybe 100 fruits. By giving farmers total insight into what they’re growing, coupled with the ability to act on our real-time recommendations, we’re accelerating the adoption of precision crop management.”

Orchard Robotics explained that the benefits of its technology reach far beyond the field, giving pack houses and marketers deep supply chain insight through early-season yield estimations that are determined well in advance of the harvest. 

And after a successful 2023 growing season, the infusion of this capital will give the company the ability to scale their team and operations to better serve their existing and future customers across large acreage, while bringing precision crop management to all aspects of the farm. 

“Beyond our advanced camera systems, our focus at Orchard Robotics also centers around our FruitScope OS,” said Wu. “We recognize that data is only useful if our farmers can actually use it. Which is why, in collaboration with our growers, we’ve built FruitScope to be the industry-leading crop load management platform, where farmers can not only view all of their orchard data, but more importantly, put it into action on their farms.”

~ Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor in chief with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and Agtech Intel News. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.

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