Date: Mar 19, 2014 Author: Natasha Lomas Source: TechCrunch (
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by Natasha Lomas
Blue River Technology, which uses robotics and computer vision to optimize agriculture by, for instance, determining which lettuces to thin out of a row and which to keep, has closed a $10 million Series A-1 funding round, led by Data Collective Venture Capital — topping up a $3.1 million Series A it raised back in 2012.
Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors also joined the round as a new investor, while existing investor Khosla Ventures participated.
Blue River Technology's main premise is to reduce the use of chemicals in food production by optimizing agricultural methods via robotics systems that can automatically recognize plants and make decisions about which crop plants to thin or identify weeds to eliminate.
Its first product is designed to precision thin lettuce crops by allowing farmers to set the required spacing between plants, and the machine to precision spray the rows to remove only the plants that aren't wanted.
Blue River Technology said it plans to use the new financing to further expand its engineering team and product offering. Specifically, it's working on extending its plant recognition systems — which is where the computer vision tech comes in — and also on big data techniques for application with row crops such as corn and soybeans, which it said can benefit from phenotyping for crop breeding as well as precise weed control.
Commenting on the funding in a statement, Vinod Khosla said: "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. I'm impressed by how quickly the company brought its first product to market, and how successful it's been. This high-caliber Blue River team has assembled leading experts spanning both cutting-edge technology and agriculture, and they are in a great position to lead the next gen of environmentally-friendly precision agriculture."
"Blue River is leveraging three important trends: machine learning, data-driven agriculture and robotics," added Matt Ocko, founding partner of Data Collective Venture Capital, in a second supporting statement. "This approach has the potential to revolutionize how we produce food in the near future."
