Date: Mar 19, 2014 Author: Cromwell Schubarth Source: bizjournals (
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by: Cromwell Schubarth
Blue River Technology, co-founded by Jorge Heraud, has raised a total of $13 million for technology that identifies unwanted plants in farm rows and pulls them out, one by one.
Blue River Technology raised $10 million in Series A follow-on funding for technology that identifies and rids farm rows of unwanted plants without using pesticides.
Data Collective Venture Capital led the round and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors joined existing investor Khosla Ventures in the round.
The Mountain View company co-founded by Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden has now raised a total of $13 million.
Heraud told me that the new money will help Blue River expand beyond its first success in pulling weeds from lettuce farms in California and Arizona.
The next phase will expand into phenotyping — helping crop breeders identify plants with the most desirable characteristics and pull out the unwanted ones.
"Right now there are two companies doing that in greenhouses but we are the only ones with technology to do it in open fields," he said.
Heraud said he also hopes to expand beyond lettuce into other row crops such as corn and soybeans.
"With our new funding, we're looking to hire passionate engineers and scientists to help us advance the boundaries of computer vision, machine learning, robotics and agriculture in order to solve real-world problems," he said.
Vinod Khosla, whose firm has been an active investor in agricultural and food tech startups, said he is impressed at how quickly the three-year-old startup has progressed.
"Blue River is taking a very innovative and practical approach to solving one of the world's top problems -- how to produce more food in a responsible way," he said in a prepared statement. "I believe they are in a great position to lead the next generation of environmentally-friendly precision agriculture."
If successful, Blue River could save farmers a lot of money now spent to control weeds. Market research firm Lucintel projects that more than $31 billion will be spent on herbicides by 2017.
