It often feels like modern-day technology has left farmers behind. This isn’t because farmers are reluctant to adopt new technologies. Instead, innovation in farming technology has been hampered by long sales cycles, engrained legacy systems, and slow feedback loops. These factors have historically made venture-scale outcomes for startups in the space difficult to achieve, and many founders have therefore shied away.
Thankfully, Charlie Wu is the exception to this. With a family background in agriculture and a personal history of robotics research, he attended Cornell specifically to explore that intersection and then dropped out when he realized that building a company was a more appropriate path for him to make an impact. He is deeply curious, humble, adaptable, and technical - all traits that we look for in the founders we back.
Charlie is building Orchard Robotics, a company that sits at the forefront of precision crop management. The company affixes AI-driven camera systems to existing farm equipment in order to collect precise data (including count, size, color, growth rate, and more) at the level of each individual piece of fruit on every tree, all done faster and more affordably than ever before.
This data feeds Orchard OS, which in turn provides crop insights and advice directly to the grower. Over time, Orchard OS will serve as a holistic view of all farm operations, enabling growers to exert precise control over every facet of their workflow. Even more important, it will give them early visibility into yield and output which are critical to managing downstream components of the supply chain.
As recently as five years ago, this type of technology was untenable and inaccessible to all but the largest of farms. However, advancements across machine learning, computer vision, and edge computing, coupled with the increasing sophistication of farm operations, have provided a critical window of opportunity to target a much larger pool of growers. We are confident that Charlie is the exact right founder to take advantage of this.
Today, Orchard is announcing $3.8 million raised across their pre-seed and seed rounds, backed by Contrary, General Catalyst, and many others. We couldn’t be more proud to have led the pre-seed and to continue supporting Charlie and his team on their journey to enable the next generation of farm technology.
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