Israeli startup SeeTree, which utilizes drones and artificial intelligence to enable precision agriculture for orchards, announced on Thursday that it has raised another $11.5 million, bringing the firm’s total valuation to $15 million.
The concept behind the 16-month-old Tel Aviv-based company, which also has offices in Brazil and California, is that drone-based precision agriculture has fallen short of expectations in the agriculture community.
“In the past two decades, since the concept was born, the application of it, as well as measuring techniques, has seen limited success—especially in the permanent-crop sector,” SeeTree CEO Israel Talpaz told TechCrunch. “They failed to reach the full potential of precision agriculture as it is meant to be.”
“Traditionally, farmers made large-scale business decisions based on intuitions that would come from limited (and often unreliable) small-scale testing done by the naked eye,” he added. “With SeeTree, farmers can now make critical decisions based on accurate and consistent small and large-scale data, connecting their actions to actual results in the field.”
