Precision Farming Startup Raises USD46.5M for Growth

U.S. precision farming startup Verdant Robotics has raised USD46.5 million Series A funding to scale its robotic weeding service technology and accelerate the broad adoption of its precision farming suite of solutions. 

Verdant Robotics offers a robotic weeding service using a multi-action three-point weeding robot that sprays, fertilizes and lasers weeds.

A specially developed implement mounted on a tractor operates with millimeter-accurate precision using liquids and lasers, with the service offered through a Robotics-as-a-service (RaaS) model.

Verdant Robotics says commercial Robotics-as-a-Service is in high demand, with the company currently servicing various specialty crops on thousands of acres in the U.S. 

Verdant’s platforms, which can go up to around 15 meters in size, can cover up to 4.2 acres per hour.

The technology can apply pollen on an apple blossom or herbicide and fertilizer on individual crops in the field — all based on different software directions without changing hardware.

The company was founded in 2018 by Curtis Garner, who brought broad experience from the farming sector, and technologist Gabe Sibley, who began as a research scientist at Oxford University and was a professor of computer science at George Washington University and the University of Colorado at Boulder before working with JPL NASA for five years.

The first two years were a “listening tour,” as Sibley told a U.S. farming magazine recently. This was spent identifying the problems farmers are facing in their operations and what kind of technical solutions could be deployed.

“Garner helped me understand the challenges in agriculture and helped me understand how technology could help,” says Sibley.

“The way the labor market is shaping up, the way input costs are going, the amount of food we need to produce — none of this squares unless we find new solutions,” Sibley told Successful Farming magazine.

Image credit: iStockphoto/waleed ahmed