FarmWise Labs brings in $45M for robotic weeding

FarmWise Labs, a company creating a robotic weeder named Titan powered by artificial intelligence, announced that it brought in $45 million in Series B funding. 

Fall Line Capital and Middleland Capital, two venture firms that focus on investing in technology for agriculture, led the funding round. Clay Mitchell, the co-founder and managing director of Fall Line Capital, is joining the FarmWise board of directors with the funding round. GV, the venture capital arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet, and Taylor Farms, a grower and processor of leafy greens and vegetables, also participated. 

“Over the past two years, it has been exciting to watch FarmWise establish itself as a reliable solutions partner to many in our industry,” Ted Taylor, head of new ventures and business development at Taylor Farms, said. “We are thrilled to be supporting FarmWise as a customer, and now investor, as they move into the future.”

FarmWise offers robotic weeding as a service with a pay-per-acre model in California and Arizona. The company has logged 15,000 commercial hours, and its database has over 450 million scanned images of individual crops. 

Titan, FarmWise’s robotic weeder, is able to use cameras, sensors and artificial intelligence to gather data about individual plants, like their size, stress levels and identifying features. This information helps it to tell the different between crops and weeds and ensures the weeder won’t pull any crops.

“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. “With rising costs in the agricultural industry, we’re continuing to expand our technology to work with many more farmers.”

The company plans to use the round of funding to accelerate the release of a vegetable weeding implement that FarmWise says could set a new standard of reliability and versatility in farm robotics. It will also help the company to serve more farmers within the industry and add capabilities for its technology to be used on row crops.