As bountiful as local farming can be in regards to providing fresh foods to nearby communities, recent reports show that agriculture is often the leading source of pollution in many countries due to pesticides, fertilizers and other toxic farm chemicals that negatively impact the air, local water streams and soil.
To combat this, the tech community has developed innovations such as solar-powered tractors to reduce carbon emissions and indoor robotic farming facilities that recycle water and minimize waste.
The latest tech-backed agricultural innovation comes from FarmWise, a Salinas-based producer of artificial intelligence-backed robotic farmland tools. On Wednesday, the startup raked in a $45 million Series B funding round co-led by Fall Line Capital and Middleland Capital.
“We started FarmWise with the conviction that farmers should be supplied with cost-effective, sustainable solutions to feed a growing world, and artificial intelligence is the ideal technology to make this a reality,” Sebastien Boyer, co-founder and CEO of FarmWise, said in a statement. “With rising costs in the agricultural industry, we’re continuing to expand our technology to work with many more farmers.”
FarmWise’s technology is utilized in large farms across California and Arizona, according to the company. Boyer told Built In via email that now was the time to bring on additional capital because the company is “facing an unprecedented demand” for the machines it is building.
With its new capital, FarmWise plans on accelerating its roadmap to release a vegetable weeding implement that will be particularly helpful to farmers within the vegetable industry.
