Charlie Wu, inspired by apple-farming grandparents and Cornell fruit research, left university as a Thiel fellow and founded Orchard Robotics in 2022. Orchard Robotics mounts small, ultra-high-resolution cameras on tractors and farm vehicles to capture images of fruit across orchards and vineyards. AI analyzes fruit size, color, and health, and the results are stored in cloud-based software that creates a central record. Growers use the data to target fertilization, pruning, thinning, chemical application, labor planning, and market forecasting. The company raised a $22 million Series A led by Quiet Capital and Shine Capital and is deployed on large apple and grape farms.
I got to meet fruit professors who are the best in the world at what they do,
Through talking to them, I realized even the largest farms in the nation basicallyhave no idea what is actually growing out in their fields.
If you don't know what you're growing in the field, you don't know how much chemical to apply to it. You don't know how many workers to hire to harvest it. You don't know what you can actually sell and market,
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