FarmWise Raises $14.5M to Grow Farming Robot System

SAN FRANCSICO – FarmWise, which develops autonomous farming robot systems, today announced raising $14.5 million in a Series A funding round, led by Calibrate Ventures. The company said it will use the funding to grow the company’s engineering and operations teams, as well as boost research and development efforts around plant-level detection and actuation capabilities. Through machine learning models, computer vision and high-precision mechanical tools, the FarmWise robots can cleanly pick weeds from fields, leaving crops with “the best opportunity to thrive while eliminating harmful chemical inputs.” Since the company’s founding in 2016, FarmWise’s robots have removed weeds from more than 10 million plants.” The company utilizes a robots-as-a-service business model, which allows farming operations of all sizes a chance to experience the system without worrying about a big capital purchase or maintaining the equipment. Looking ahead, our robots will increasingly act as specialized doctors for crops, monitoring individual health and adjusting targeted interventions according to a crop’s individual needs.” In an interview with Robotics Business Review, Boyer said he and co-founder Thomas Palomares were looking at ways to provide eco-friendly processes and sustainable farming options when they started the company in 2016. With backgrounds in machine learning, computer science and engineering, robotics didn’t enter the equation until they had spoken with farmers about their problems around sustainable farming, and realized that combining their software with a vehicle that could also pull the weeds was the right direction to go.