Israeli start-up company Propsera recently received round A of US$7 million in financing. This Tel Aviv company is part of a growing "precision agriculture" technology company founded by several computer scientists in 2014 to use computer vision, machine learning and agricultural technology to accurately determine the demand for crops in different regions. To increase crop production efficiency and save resources.
Daniel Koppel, CEO and co-founder of Propsera, said that agricultural experts have a lot of high-tech equipment at their disposal, whether it is soil and weather monitoring sensors or high-altitude images that are relied on by drones and satellites. But ordinary farmers do not have these high-tech equipment, and the use of these equipment requires considerable expertise. Farmers are still unable to intuitively know how to increase the production of crops as a whole. For example, knowing when late blight and tomato littoralis are beginning to invade them. Potatoes and tomatoes.
Propsera's system allows farmers to stay up-to-date on their own crops. It can be installed in fields and sheds, mainly including RGB cameras and cloud-based software placed in the field to collect and analyze all the information that farmers have missed. Other devices include: a solar panel, various sensors that detect temperature, humidity, and light.
Koppel claims that their systems get images more accurately than satellites and drones, and that they use a much wider range of fields that can be photographed indoors and in some aerial photography.
Koppe said: “We can see how the plants grow through the system; plant colors, flowers, the density and quality of the fruits; where the honeybees are, and the signs of diseases that appear on the leaves.†These images combined with machine learning can be analyzed in real time. And report on major events in the field.
Propsera's system can help farmers to understand their impact on the processing of crops in a timely manner. If it is a good result, the farmers will continue to follow the original plan, but if it is a bad result, the farmers can also change them in time. Planting measures.
Propsera's technology is currently used in large-scale greenhouse farms in Europe, North America and Israel. The products of these farms are supplied to large supermarkets such as Wal-Mart and Tesco.
Propsera investment company Bessemer, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm whose partner Adam Fisher said in a statement: “Propsera can produce unique and exclusive crop data that, combined with machine vision and machine learning technologies, will have the potential to disrupt traditional crop cultivation. potential."
Currently Propsera faces many competitors, including Precision Hawk and DJI. The two companies have previously cooperated to provide drones to monitor the health of crops; there is also the Cable company that designs products with the famous designer Fred Bould. This company also Provide very sophisticated crop health monitoring products.
Via TC&GeekTime