Orchard Robotics, founded by Cornell dropout and Thiel Fellow Charlie Wu, has raised $22 million in Series A funding led by Quiet Capital and Shine Capital to expand its AI-powered farm vision technology. The startup uses tractor-mounted cameras and artificial intelligence to help fruit growers precisely monitor crop health, addressing a critical gap where even the largest U.S. farms rely on manual sampling to make crucial operational decisions.
The founder’s story: Wu was inspired by his apple farmer grandparents in China and discovered the agricultural technology gap while studying computer science at Cornell University, a leading 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 founded Orchard Robotics in 2022.
How the technology works: Orchard’s system attaches small cameras to tractors or farm vehicles to collect ultra-high-resolution images of fruit health as operators drive through fields.
• AI software analyzes the images for fruit size, color, and health indicators.
• Data uploads to Orchard’s cloud-based software, creating a central record for decisions about fertilization, pruning, thinning, and harvest planning.
• The system helps farmers determine chemical application rates, worker hiring needs, and marketing projections.
Market traction: The company has already deployed its technology across some of the country’s largest apple and grape farms and recently expanded to additional crops.
• Current crop offerings include blueberries, cherries, almonds, pistachios, citrus, and strawberries.
• The existing fruit and vegetable data market is valued at $1.5 billion, according to Wu.
Competitive landscape: Orchard faces competition from several companies using similar tractor-mounted camera systems for specialty crop analysis.
• Direct competitors include Bloomfield Robotics, which was acquired by farm equipment manufacturer Kubota last year.
• Seed-stage startups Vivid Robotics and Green Atlas also operate in this space.
Future ambitions: Wu envisions Orchard evolving beyond data collection to become a comprehensive farm operating system, similar to how Flock Safety expanded from license plate recognition to a $7.5 billion public safety platform.
• “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.”
• Future AI advancements could enable autonomous decision-making, potentially expanding the company’s addressable market significantly.
Why this matters: Manual crop sampling leaves farmers with imprecise estimates about their yields, leading to inefficient resource allocation and missed revenue opportunities across billions of dollars in specialty crop production.
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