Orchard Robotics Secures $22 Million to Bring AI-Powered vision to Specialty Crop Farming
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – Orchard Robotics, a startup developing artificial intelligence-powered computer vision for specialty crops, has raised $22 million in a new funding round. The investment was led by Insight Partners, with participation from returning investors General Catalyst and Contrary.Founded by Cornell university dropout and Thiel Fellow, Justin Wu, Orchard Robotics aims to modernize farm management by replacing manual crop sampling with data-driven insights. Despite the potential of computer vision in agriculture, Wu notes that even the largest U.S. farms currently rely on manual inspection for critical operational decisions.
“If you don’t know what you’re growing in the field, you don’t know how much chemical to apply to it. You don’t know how many workers to hire to harvest it. You don’t know what you can actually sell and market,” Wu explained.
Orchard’s system utilizes small, ultra-high-resolution cameras attached to tractors or other farm vehicles to capture images of fruit health as they move through fields.AI algorithms then analyze these images, assessing fruit size, color, and overall health. This data is uploaded to Orchard’s cloud-based software, providing a centralized record to inform decisions regarding fertilization, pruning, and thinning.Currently deployed in apple and grape farms across the country, Orchard Robotics has recently expanded its technology to include blueberries, cherries, almonds, pistachios, citrus, and strawberries.
The company operates in a growing market alongside competitors like bloomfield Robotics – recently acquired by Kubota – as well as seed-stage startups Vivid Robotics and Green Atlas. while the current market for fruit and vegetable data is estimated at $1.5 billion, Wu envisions future AI advancements enabling autonomous decision-making, considerably expanding Orchard’s product offerings.
Wu hopes to mirror the growth trajectory of public safety startup Flock Safety,evolving from a data collection service to a comprehensive operating system for farm workflows. “our ambition is to be a lot more then just collecting data,” Wu saeid. “We want to collect the data, then build an operating system on top of the data, and then eventually own all the workflows in the farm, and that’s going to have the potential to expand our market by quite a bit.”
