Inspired by his grandparents, who were apple farmers in China, Charlie Wu got the idea to apply technology to agriculture while studying computer science at Cornell University, a top agriculture school.
“I got to meet fruit professors who are the best in the world at what they do,” Wu told TechCrunch. “Through talking to them, I realized even the largest farms in the nation basically have no idea what is actually growing out in their fields.”
He dropped out of Cornell, became a Thiel fellow, and in 2022 began building Orchard Robotics, a startup that uses cameras and AI to help fruit growers manage their crops more precisely.
On Wednesday, Orchard Robotics announced that it raised a $22 million Series A funding led by Quiet Capital and Shine Capital, and with participation from returning investors including General Catalyst and Contrary.
Although the idea of using computer vision for specialty crops isn’t new, Wu says that the largest farms in the US still rely on manual sampling to make critical decisions about farm operations.
Since farmers inspect only a small percentage of their crops, their estimations of how many healthy fruits they have on their vineyard or orchard can be extremely imprecise.
“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 said.
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Orchard’s small camera attaches to tractors or farm vehicles, collecting ultra-high-resolution images about fruit health as the operator drives through the field. Those images are then analyzed by AI for fruit size, color, and health.
The data is then uploaded into Orchard’s cloud-based software, which acts as a central record for making decisions such as the vines or trees that may need extra fertilization, pruning or thinning.
Orchard is already in use in some of the country’s largest apple and grape farms, and the startup recently began to offer its technology to blueberries, cherries, almonds, pistachios, citrus, and strawberry growers.
The company is not alone in its use of tractor-mounted cameras to leverage AI for specialty crop image analysis. Orchard’s direct competitors include Bloomfield Robotics, which last year was acquired by farm equipment manufacturer Kubota, as well as seed-stage startups Vivid Robotics and Green Atlas.
Wu admits the existing market for fruit and vegetable data is only $1.5 billion, but he believes that future AI advancements will allow the technology to make autonomous decisions, expanding Orchard’s product offerings.
He hopes Orchard’s evolution mirrors that of Flock Safety, a public safety startup now valued at $7.5 billion, which over the past eight years has expanded from simply collecting license plate information to a range of other products, including gunshot detection and video surveillance.
“Our ambition is to be a lot more than just collecting data,” Wu said. “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.”