Precision crop load management platform secures $4 mln in seed funding

FruitScout, the world’s first mobile-based, AI-powered precision crop load management (PCLM) platform, recently announced $4 million in seed round funding led by Bowery Capital and TFX Capital with additional capital from SaaS Ventures, among others.

FruitScout’s innovative approach to precision crop load management combines their patented computer vision processing system with the ease and accessibility of phone-based data collection, allowing growers increased per-acre profitability while reducing labor costs and improving sustainability.

The funding follows a successful launch this past spring of the FruitScout platform for apples and agave. The first company of its kind in agtech to secure venture backing, FruitScout will use the funds to expand its engineering, field service, and go-to-market teams.

“What excited us most about FruitScout is its opportunity to not just transform how apples and agave are grown, which is huge in itself, but their potential to make all agricultural crops more predictable, profitable and sustainable using nothing more than a mobile phone,” said Loren Straub, general partner at Bowery Capital, who led the round and will join the firm’s board.

FruitScout’s PCLM Cloud platform replaces both traditional manually-intensive counting and sizing techniques and prohibitively expensive, specialized tractor- and drone-mounted cameras, making precision crop load management accessible to both industrial-scale and family growers for the first time.

“We’ve embraced precision crop load management because it is transforming the apple business. FruitScout listens to us and gives us information in the way we think about it without requiring us to change our existing practices. They instead allow us to scale those practices, and the benefits they provide, to a whole new level. We can collect more data faster with FruitScout with no capital outlays,” said Dan Plath, President of Washington Fruit and Produce, one of the world’s top growers of apples.