Orchard Robotics, a company enabling precision crop management with robots and AI, has raised $3.8 million in a seed round led by General Catalyst and a pre-seed led by Contrary. Humba Ventures, Soma Capital, Correlation Ventures, VU Venture Partners, Ben Taft’s Genius Ventures, angel investors Howard Lerman, Joshua Browder, Rory, Kieran O’Reilly, and many others also joined the round.
This investment enables the company to scale its team and operations to serve existing and future customers across larger acreages while bringing precision crop management.
Orchard has built AI-driven camera systems that can be affixed to any farm vehicle. These systems collect precise data about each tree’s fruit (including fruit count, size, color, growth rate, etc.). Many of the nation’s largest fruit growers use the company’s technology to maximize yield and quality in the field and make strategic supply chain decisions post-harvest.
Fruit orchards span thousands of acres with millions of trees, growing hundreds of millions of pounds of produce. However, farmers have been forced to depend on small and imprecise sample sizes to make critical crop management decisions that affect the whole farm’s outcome. Every tree is unique, and specific inputs, treatments, and care are needed in all seasons to produce the best fruit. Across millions of trees, imprecise and homogenous treatments lead to inefficient resource usage, costly labor, and a significant loss of potential crop value.
Charles Wu launched the company at Cornell University. The company’s technology has been validated to provide accurate counts when adequately calibrated consistently.
The company now aids farmers in precision pruning, thinning, and spraying for targeted crop load management that reduces labor costs while ensuring each tree gets what it needs to thrive.
The company’s technology’s impact stretches far beyond the field. And it helps packhouses and marketers gain detailed insights into their supply chains through early-season yield estimates, which is well before the first fruit comes off the tree.
Wu – who serves as CEO of the company – was also recently announced as a member of the newest class of Thiel Fellows.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our mission at Orchard Robotics is to help farmers produce more food for the world, more profitability, efficiently, and sustainably. This starts with giving farmers the precision data they need to do what they do best. Growing better fruit begins with knowing what you’re growing. 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. 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.”
“Beyond our advanced camera systems, our focus at Orchard Robotics also centers around our FruitScope OS. 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.”
– Charles Wu
“Orchard Robotics has a bold vision to transform the future of farming and bring digitization and automation to farms. 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.”
– Niko Bonatsos, Managing Director, and Max Rimpel, partner, at General Catalyst
“By pushing crop yield beyond previously imagined limits, Charlie is paving the way for a future where farmers will be truly omniscient, understanding their yields at the cellular level. Orchard’s transformative approach will render the Agricultural Revolution a mere prelude to a future that truly reflects the skills, talent, and passion of America’s farmers.”
– Alex Handy, Director of the Thiel Fellowship
