The Venture Codex

Participated · Series B · Jun 2022

FarmWise develops and deploys autonomous weeding robotics, using AI to scan and tend vegetable crops. The company has operated commercially in California and Arizona and its robots have logged 15,000 commercial hours and captured about 450 million crop scans. FarmWise’s core product is designed to provide cost-effective, sustainable solutions to labor shortages on farms. The new funding will accelerate R&D and the rollout of its existing product to more farmers. CEO Sebastien Boyer emphasized expanding the technology to work with many more farmers amid rising agricultural costs. Fall Line Capital co-founder Clay Mitchell is joining FarmWise’s board as part of the round. FarmWise develops autonomous, AI-enabled farming robots that perform a variety of field tasks beginning with precision weeding and personalized care for individual plants. Its machines use machine learning models, computer vision and high-precision mechanical tools to remove weeds while eliminating chemical inputs. FarmWise reports its robots have removed weeds from more than 10 million plants and says each robot can weed crops sufficient to feed a medium-sized city of roughly 400,000 inhabitants. The company is enhancing the scale and depth of its proprietary plant-detection and actuation technology so robots can monitor plant health and deliver targeted interventions, effectively acting as specialized doctors for crops. FarmWise employs a 25-person team of farming and AI experts drawn from MIT, Stanford and Columbia and recently raised capital to expand engineering, operations and R&D. FarmWise develops adaptive autonomous farming equipment that leverages computer vision, deep learning and plant recognition to perform effective weeding. Its machines aim to replace herbicides, increase yields and adapt to different crops. The company says its machine learning algorithms will enable the systems to adjust to additional farming tasks over time. FarmWise was founded in 2016 by Sebastien Boyer and is based in San Francisco, CA. The company raised $5.7M in seed funding to pilot its first autonomous machines on some of the largest vegetable farms in the US and to expand its engineering team. As part of the financing, inventor Bruce Leak joined FarmWise's board of directors.

Participated · Seed · Apr 2021

Guardian Agriculture develops the Guardian SC1, an autonomous, electric aerial crop protection system designed for commercial-scale sustainable farming. The company, led by founder and CEO Adam Bercu, designs and manufactures its systems entirely within the U.S. Founded in 2017, Guardian is based in Woburn, Massachusetts, with offices in California. It has accumulated more than $100 million in customer orders. Guardian raised $20M in a Series A and plans to use the funds to accelerate production and expand commercial operations to farms nationwide. The company will begin commercial operations supporting a Wilbur‑Ellis customer in California this summer. Guardian Agriculture has developed an integrated, US-manufactured eVTOL system for precision agricultural application, offered as a data-driven crop protection service. Its autonomous eVTOL platform collects and acts on crop-health data to target treatments, aiming to reduce pesticide use and minimize environmental impact. The company completed 18 months of R&D with partners across multiple high-value crops and is led by a team with backgrounds in autonomous systems from Apple, Otto, and Uber. Guardian says its systems could eliminate hundreds of millions of pounds of unnecessary pesticide use annually when deployed at scale. The business has built a backlog of more than $20 million in service reservation agreements and is ramping production to meet initial demand. The offering is positioned as immediately practical without requiring infrastructure changes, with plans to accelerate development and production.

Participated · Series A · Mar 2021

SomaDetect has developed an in-line sensor that emits light into milk hoses and analyzes scatter patterns to determine somatic cell counts, a direct indicator of mastitis. The device combines computer vision and deep neural networks to build algorithms that predict relevant compounds and early infections. The startup has been trialing the technology with partner Summitholm Holsteins and is planning broader beta tests at Canadian dairy farms. After beta trials the company intends to begin taking orders for the sensor; an ideal customer farm is described as around 2,000 cows. SomaDetect positions its product as a seamless, farmer-first integration into milking systems to reduce milk loss and early-detect infections that cost roughly $200 per cow per year. The company is preparing for commercialization while building customer deployments and data to refine its models. SomaDetect produces an in-line sensor that attaches to a tablet alongside the milking hose and uses light scattering, computer vision, and deep neural networks to measure somatic cell counts and other milk compounds. The sensor analyzes scatter patterns to determine cell counts, enabling twice-daily monitoring of individual cows during milking and delivering real-time alerts to farmers. SomaDetect positions this continuous monitoring as a faster, more actionable alternative to monthly lab sampling that can take a week to return results. The company is collecting data at scale and aims to transition from tens of thousands to millions of data points to improve its algorithms and product. Management sees opportunities to expand the technology into other on-farm applications such as breeding and broader milk-quality monitoring, while prioritizing earning farmers’ trust through reliable core functionality. The business faces adoption headwinds from subscription cost sensitivity among farmers but is supported by early adopters and industry partnerships. SomaDetect offers a data-driven herd-monitoring system that gives farmers actionable information to produce higher-quality milk. The company was one of two winners of Communitech’s Fierce Founders bootcamp pitch finale and received a $50,000 award. The bootcamp targets early-stage entrepreneurs at MVP or pre‑MVP stage and included 20 participating startups, nine of which pitched in the finale. As a winner, SomaDetect was invited to join the third cohort of the Fierce Founders Accelerator, a six‑month program that provides mentorship and requires entrepreneurs to match at least $30,000 in funding. The article does not disclose revenue, user metrics, prior financings, or founders beyond the award and accelerator invitation.