The garden robots, founded by Thiel Cornell Reprot colleague, earns $ 22 million to AI’s farm message

It is inspired by his ancestors, who were from Apple farmers in China, Charlie Woo got the idea of ​​applying technology to agriculture while studying computer science at Cornell University, a large agricultural school.

“I met the fruit professors who are the best in the world as they are doing,” Wu told Techcrunch. “By talking to them, I realized even the largest farmer in the country mainly You have no idea what is already growing in their fields. “

He came out of Cornell, became a colleague in Thil, and in 2022 he started construction RoboticsStarting the cameras and AI to help fruit farmers manage their crops more accurately.

On Wednesday, Orchard Robotics announced that it had raised $ 22 million in the Cealn Capital and Shine Capital, and the participation of returning investors, including General Catalyst, and vice versa.

Although the idea of ​​using a computer vision for specialized crops is not new, Wu says that the largest farm in the United States still depends on manual samples to make critical decisions on agricultural operations.

Since farmers are looking for only a small percentage of their crops, their estimates of the number of healthy fruits have a generosity or garden can be very inaccurate.

Wu said: “If you do not know what you grow in this field, you do not know how much the chemical that must be applied to it.

The small ORCARD camera is attached to the tractors or agricultural vehicles, and collecting high -resolution images about the health of the fruit with the driving of the operator across the field. Then these images are analyzed by artificial intelligence of fruit, color and health.

The data is then uploaded to the ORCHARD program, which is based on the core group, which works as a major record to make decisions such as chrome or trees that may need more fertilization, pruning or mitigation.

Orchard is already used in some of the largest apple and grape farms in the country, and Startup recently began to present its technology to blue berries, cherries, almonds, pistachios, citrus fruits and strawberries.

The company is not alone in its use of jars to take advantage of artificial intelligence to analyze specialized crop images. Among the direct competitors of the Orchaard Bloomfield Robotics, which was last year acquired By the manufacturer of agricultural equipment kubota, as well as startups in the stage of live robots and green Atlas.

Wu admits that the current market for fruit and vegetable data is only $ 1.5 billion, but he believes that the progress of the future intelligence will allow technology to make independent decisions and expand the Orchard products offers.

It hopes that the development of the Orchard from the safety of Flock, a public safety startup that is now 7.5 billion dollars, which has expanded over the past eight years to collect the license board information to a group of other products, including the discovery of holidays and video control.

“Our ambition is to be much more than just collecting data,” said Wu. “We want to collect data, then create an operating system above the data, then we finally have all the workflow tasks on the farm, and it will have the ability to expand our market with a great deal.”