AgTech
Farms produce a lot of data. From machines to irrigation systems, farms generate a lot of information that could be helpful to both them and the companies that serve them.…
Nathan Rosenberg, the founder of farm automation platform Farmblox, said if there is one thing to know about trying to sell technology to farmers, it’s that you can’t tell them…
Robovision has raised $42M to industrialize deep learning tools and make them more accessible to businesses that are not tech companies at their core.
Migrant workers are a critical labor force for U.S. farms, but getting them here on proper H-2A visas can be complicated, and the compliance surrounding these employees is taxing for…
Globally, a third of the food produced is lost or wasted, and in Kenya, that figure stands between 20% and 40%. For Kenya, unlike the developed world, food loss, not…
A 2021 study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78% of fruit production, 54% of vegetable production, and 32% of cereal production. At the same time,…
Bluewhite rakes in $39M for robots-as-a-service that can be retrofitted to drive any tractor
Agriculture has a long heritage of being constantly disrupted by technology, an evolution that has continued to play out until today. In one of the latest developments, an Israeli startup…
Shamba Pride has since 2016 worked to enhance last-mile distribution for farm inputs and tackle price exploitation and quality issues for farmers through its merchant network dubbed digishops. The agtech…
The fund is technically a nonprofit with a debt fund attached.
One can’t accuse Bonsai Robotics of lacking focus. The Bay Area-based firm is starting with trees — specifically nut trees. Like most labor-intensive sectors these days, farms have suffered from…
The UN estimates that about one-third of all food produced goes to waste before it even gets the chance to decompose in your fridge. That abysmal stat explains one key…
Lab-grown meat is buzzy for a reason. The ick factor is palpable, and the benefits of scaling alternatives to factory farming are enormous. Yet, plenty of other crucial corners of…
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Agri-Trak is helping farms replace pen and paper with digital tools to track labor and production
Meet Agri-Trak, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform designed to help farms digitize, track and analyze their labor and production. The Pultneyville, New York-based startup presented today at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield to detail how its labor tracking and H2-A compliance software is helping farms replace pen and paper with easy-to-use digital…
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AI startup speeds up the creation of climate-resilient crops
Creating crops that’ll endure climate change — think worse droughts, heat waves and pests — is a time-consuming and costly feat. Avalo is betting its machine learning models can speed that process up and make it a whole lot cheaper too. The Durham, North Carolina–based startup, which pitched onstage at…
FarmWorks, a Kenyan agtech that provides farmers with access to farm inputs, and market for their produce, has raised $4.1 million in a pre-Series A round led by Acumen Resilient…
Performance Livestock Analytics spun out from Zoetis because the startup thought it could achieve better scale on its own.
Welcome back to Found, where we get the stories behind the startups. This week Becca and Dom are joined by Charles Baron, the co-founder and…
If I’m an investor hoping to determine where robotics goes next after logistics, I’m looking at three key categories: construction, healthcare and agriculture. All are still in their relative infancy…
Based in the Netherlands, blossoming agtech startup Source.ag has announced a $23 million Series A funding round to help grow its business, less than a year after its previous, $10…
Green Labs, a South Korean agtech startup that raised $140 million (170 billion won) Series C in January last year, is cutting a significant number of jobs. People familiar with…
Canadian vertical farming startup Adapt AgTech is partnering with Reef Technology to bring its mushroom-growing shipping containers to major cities across the United States, starting with Austin. Reef transforms urban…
As the bee population declines, this startup secures $8M to apply AI and EVs to pollination
Given our general reliance on something called “food” you’d think the issue of pollination — and its general decline — might be higher up the world’s agenda. Over 80% of…
What is automation good for? Harvesting more broccoli than human laborers can, according to Upp, a Shropshire, U.K.-based agtech startup that’s using computer vision AI plus farm-sized proprietary machinery to…
A little over two years after its public debut, Mineral is becoming its own Alphabet company. The team, which was formerly known as the “Computational Agriculture Project” (no prizes for…
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Labby wants to make milk healthier and cows happier with better sensors
For most dairy farmers, milk flowing from their cows is tested by a traveling technician once per month. But in a world where bovine mastitis can appear from one day to the next, it is udderly ridiculous to test milk flowing from cows once per month. Today at TechCrunch Startup Battlefield, Labby…
AgriWebb’s software seeks to boost yields, lower environmental impacts for farmers and ranchers
AgriWebb is on a mission to help livestock producers feed the world efficiently, profitably and sustainably by providing its comprehensive, ground-truth database for beef production worldwide. The Australian startup, which…
As startups look for ways to help agriculture adapt, agtech VCs share how the climate crisis informs their investment strategies.
Nearly anything can tear a co-founder relationship asunder. I have observed partnerships go sour over funding disputes, product pipelines, and in one case, a bad experience at Burning Man.
FlyFeed claims it signed more than $10 million worth of contracts and closed a $3 million round of investment to launch its first insect farm in Vietnam, in its push…
Climate change and geopolitical instability are wreaking havoc on agriculture, so we surveyed seven investors to learn what they’re looking at.
