AgTech

AgZen’s RealCoverage wants to keep pesticides only where they are needed

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, the way pesticides are

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 called Bluew

Kenyan agtech Shamba Pride raises $3.7M to grow its merchant network

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 agt

VC Office Hours: Unlocking the farmers’ market with Black Farmer Fund

The fund is technically a nonprofit with a debt fund attached.

Eyeing vision-based autonomy for farm equipment, Bonsai Robotics raises $10.5M

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 fr

PureSpace prevents spoiled produce by removing ripening gas

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 reason why leading VCs and celeb

Agtech leaders dish on untapped and overlooked opportunities for founders

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 agriculture often go

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 TechC

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 p

Kenya’s FarmWorks raises $4M pre-Series A funding

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 Agriculture Fund, an

Deal Dive: Backing a founder again after they’ve spun out from their acquirer

Performance Livestock Analytics spun out from Zoetis because the startup thought it could achieve better scale on its own.

Farmers use tech too with Charles Baron from Farmers Business Network

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 CMO at Farmers Business Network (FBN), a startup that offer

Carbon’s laser weeding robots score another $30M

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 infa

Source.ag raises $23M to raise the bar on raising crops with AI

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 million round. The

Agtech Green Labs is the latest Korean startup to lay off employees 

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 the matter confirmed t

From shipping container to table: Adapt brings urban mushroom farms to US

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

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 crops requ

Upp wants to add more broccoli to the plant-protein mix using big automation

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 proprieta

Alphabet X graduates robotic agtech firm Mineral

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 guess

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 ridicu
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