Hexafarms, a Berlin-based start-up that combines wireless sensors, cameras, robots and machine learning to help commercial growers run their crops, has raised €4.8 million in a seed round. The money is for its wireless crop sensing and its automated scouting for pests and diseases, and for expansion across the German-speaking DACH countries, Benelux and Spain.
The problem it sets out to solve, founder David Ahmed told AgNavigator, is that growers sit on far more information than they use. A greenhouse tomato crop responds to carbon dioxide, temperature, humidity and solar radiation, and aiming a harvest at a particular week means juggling more factors than a person can tune by hand. Hexafarms measures those conditions continuously and feeds them, with camera data on the plants, into AI models that recommend how to grow.
The company says its system is now used by more than 50 growers in 13 countries, among them SanLucar and the grower cooperatives Elo and Royal ZON. Customers managed more than €300 million worth of produce through its technology this year, it says, and its models cover around 50 cultivars.
The round was led by Ananda Impact Ventures and Green Generation Fund, with Grey Silo Ventures and better ventures joining existing backers Speedinvest, Mudcake and Techstars. Hexafarms has also secured Rentenbank's Startup Grant and a subordinated loan of up to €800,000.
Ahmed makes large claims for the approach. "Even the best of the growers are leaving 30% on the table in revenue improvement," he said. He argues that by analysing thousands of tomato plants a day for fruit and flower count, stem diameter and leaf size, the start-up holds more data on a crop than seed breeders such as Bayer and Syngenta. The company also says eight in ten human experts it surveyed now trust its system more than their own intuition. These are the company's figures; AgNavigator noted that Hexafarms is younger than a single crop rotation and that AI models are only as good as the data they are given.
What is new is the hardware. Hexafarms has built its own low-cost, high-resolution cameras and inexpensive wireless sensors it describes as close to lab-grade, and it is moving into robotics. "We started with four camera lenses looking per hectare. Now we are launching robots which will be covering every single plant," Ahmed said.
For greenhouse growers the pitch is a harvest planned by measurement rather than by trial and error from one season to the next, with pests and diseases spotted by machines rather than by walking the rows.
Reported by Harry Holmes for AgNavigator.
Source: AgNavigator
Comments
(0)