Agtech Koidra Receives $3.77M Grant from USDA to Develop Artificial Intelligence Technology in Partnership with Universities – GeekWire
Summary
The grant was awarded for a period of four years by the United States Department of Agriculture.Technology: Founder Kenneth Tran He was a principal applied scientist for Microsoft Research for more than seven years before launching Koidra in 2020. Reinforcement learning focuses on real-time decision-making and improvement.Using this technology, Koidra has twice win win The International Self-Warming Challenge, a competition held at the prestigious Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands.In the four-month competition, the Koidra team used its software to remotely adjust greenhouse parameters such as lighting, ventilation, heating, irrigation, fogging and blackout screens to grow superior lettuce heads.Financing: Koidra previously raised a file $4.5 million seed round Earlier this year. The new grant will allow the company to work with university experts to further develop and validate data and models that inform decision-making to improve production growth.Agtech is an increasingly hot space for venture capital. Agricultural technology companies last year raised $10.9 billion worldwide through more than 900 deals, according to research from PitchBook.the reason: In its presentation to the USDA, the team noted that the United States has a limited pool of farmers with local expertise and technology in Controlled Ecological Agriculture, or CEA.The development of CEA technology through domestic R&D capacity in the United States is largely lagging behind, the researchers wrote. This heavy reliance on outside technologies in a rapidly expanding industry creates unbalanced access and affordability.