Orchard Robotics raises $22M Series A to bring precision AI vision to fruit farming

Yeah. Thanks, guys. Bye. Cheers. Our next guest, Charlie from Orchard Robotics, is in the reream waiting room. We'll bring in Charlie from Orchard. Charlie. Charlie. Charlie. Orchard. Orchard. com, a teal fellow Cornell dropout. Wow. Flush. How you doing, Charlie? Charlie, it's great to have you in the Ultra Dome.

Great to be on the uh the Temple of Technology, the capital's capital. The Welcome. There we go. There we go. What What else can we do? Can we play a soundboard for you? Can we ring this gong for you? Do you have anything for us? It would be an honor to us. Give us something. Yeah.

So, today we announced our $22 million series A led by Quiet Capital and SH. Let's go. So excited to finally have the space out there. We've been growing the team a bunch. We've been scaling up our technology into a bunch of new farms. It's really been an exciting time these last couple of months.

Thank you for making cool looking robots. We got to we got to pull this. We got to we'll have the team pull up pull up the landing page. I want to look through this. Also, thank you for making a company with a name that directly translates to what you do. Orchard. ai. It's a farming company. Uh it's fantastic.

Uh, and I love your background, by the way. How did you get into this? Did you just like do a market map and figure out there's opportunity in farming or did you have some background? How did you like that? My My grandparents were actually apple farmers and my parents agriculture before they immigrated to the US.

I grew up in Virginia, got into robotics early on, built my first robot when I was like seven years old, trained my first ML model in middle school, ended up going to school to study CS and mechanical engineering. And this was kind of during the COVID years.

And um people love people to know this, but Cornell is actually the number one agriculture school in the nation. And we have a robot, John. It's a beautiful robot. You made a beautiful robot. Yeah, thank you. It's our our our amazing team made that.

But um it's it's been a pretty long journey the past three years to get to this point actually. And you know, the first iteration of this was actually this huge six foot tall autonomous rover that I built my dorm room. And then we realized, wait a minute, you know, you don't really need a rover.

You can just have a camera because you have tractors that go through the farms all day already.

Um, but really it was talking to I think you know when I first started the company I talked to like a hundred different farmers just drove around upstate New York talked to everyone I could and basically learned that you know here in the US even on the largest commercial farms like these farmers are relying on very very small amounts of data to make every decision.

So, you know, say an apple farmer is going to send their 10 best workers out to the fields for an entire week to count and size fruit on trees. And maybe with 400 man hours, they get to 500 trees. Seems like a lot until you realize there's 5 million trees in the farm.

And that sample size is what they use to make every decision across their entire company, which is kind of insane to think about, but you know, we're helping them get So, you started starting with with counting, which sounds simple, but So, we we can do a lot of things.

We started with now we can count and size, measure color, measure grade, detect disease, measure growth rate, do inventories of plants.

Basically tell a farmer everything they want to know that can be, you know, gleaned from visual information out in the fields, which is, you know, pretty much all of the important information that they've, you know, been lacking for these last couple of decades. Nerd out with me for a second on the hardware.

I see a bunch of different lenses and cameras on here. I imagine that that you're driving right by a tree. There's going to be apples that are obscured by leaves. You need high definition, some 4K, 8K, some zoomed in, some zoomed out.

Like what's the optic stack that gets you enough resolution or data to actually determine, you know, is this an Apple or is this Apple healthy? Like, walk me through that decision. Yeah, sure. We have four lenses on each of our cameras and they're basically two stereo pairs. Uh we use stereo vision. They're RGB cameras.

They're pretty much off-the-shelf cameras. Camera technology has gotten really good in the last couple of years. Um, the real magic is in the machine learning models that we run on the edge. So, we have some state-of-the-art multiobject detection tracking models that we run on cameras.

We have NVIDIA Jets and or inside every single one of them that run these models the edge.

And we can basically do things like, you know, of the hundred images we take every single second, we can tell, you know, even through occlusion, through, you know, things like leaves blocking fruit or fruit that are, you know, as small as 5 millimeters, we can actually size. Uh you actually hit the nail on the head.

We have a really wide angle lens and a really narrow angle lens and that lets you know do things like zoom in to see very very small things but also things like a you know 12 foot tall tree from three or four feet away. Yeah.

Being a farmer and just refreshing your dashboard and seeing that you have a bountiful harvest must must must hit extremely hard. Uh how do you how do you how do you sell robots?

Are are you uh like I imagine if this is replacing the need to send hundred, you know, hundreds of people or a bunch of people into the field to like physically count fruit, it's uh it can pay itself back fairly quickly. But what what's the what's the business model?

Yeah, so we actually charge a per acre per year subscription fee. So it's it's similar to SAS pricing where it scales a on the number of acres they use it on. We since the hardware is so, you know, relatively inexpensive, we actually don't even charge for the hardware.

It's it's it's you know boxed in with the subscription fee. So it's really easy and not capital intensive for a farmer to you know try on a couple hundred acres and scale into thousands or tens of thousands of acres. Are those LED lights on the sides of the robot? They are. Yeah. They're LED strobe lights.

So even at night we we can operate. Oh, and you and you only strobe them when you're taking a picture with the cameras to save energy. Yep. Makes a ton of sense. All of the cameras are powered. So we we actually can power them off of any 12volt power source.

So we, you know, we have farmers that actually plug them into like the uh the 12vt sockets like the car jacks like on your car. Uh we have, you know, like people who use external batteries. You know, you can wire it into like, you know, the the car battery of any tractor or ATV.

It's really What's the What's the refresh rate on the flashing on the strobes? Are you doing like one per second or something? It's it's more It depends, but it's more than 15 times a second. 15 times a second. You're flashing LED lights. Is this going to make squirrels go insane? Hopefully the squirrels aren't awake.

I might have a problem. Yeah, go to sleep, squirrels. Yeah, we're doing farming out here. We're farming. Get out of here. Uh yeah, I mean I maybe there's a pest control.

We talked to the laser weer guy and uh maybe there's a pest control angle where maybe you can also You have a lot of VCs on tell you to pick a different.

Oh yeah, it actually it's it's a it's a good point that you brought up because you know we started this company back in March of 2022 and it was actually I think it was around the time that like the whole American dynamism thing and they were like please make weapons please make weapons. I'll give you 100 million.

Put a gun on it. I I I I remember actually when I when I met my first like VC ever, they were like, "Oh, you should pivot into crypto. " Like that that was the because this is March of 2022. It was before everything came, you know, tumbling down. And you know, we were like, h, you know, I don't really want to do crypto.

I think, you know, this is my life's work. I'm going to do this for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years.

Um, and, you know, I think over the last year or so, there's been kind of this rise in, you know, robotics and American dynamism and, you know, like manufacturing, all these like industry things and, you know, suddenly, you know, agriculture and a tech is sexy now.

And, you know, it's been, you know, uh, when we went out to raise this last round, it was, I'd say, a bit, I don't say easy. Nothing's ever easy, but you know, it was it was a lot better than, you know, when we were raising our first two rounds. You could have gone into beans. Do you remember beans? Beans.

Hey, you know, I I've actually heard that uh coffee beans are are a pretty big market. I'm talking about I'm talking about the crypto project beans.

I don't know if you're familiar with this, but it was popular on Twitter for like, you know, right around that time, right about when you would have been print uh uh uh pivoting from agriculture themed robotics into agriculture themed uh crypto.

It was a very popular crypto app where you would put your the whole thing was like staking coins, but the metaphor was like you stake your beans and your beans uh harvest and they yield and stuff and then every there were tons of people that all of a sudden they put in like $1,000 and then they like the the the harvest came and they were worth like a million dollars on paper, but then the the thing got hacked and so they lost all their money.

It was a wild I'm glad I'm glad you you tripled down.

Seems like you did something much more value creative than It feels like um I have to imagine uh this is like already helping solve labor shortages with farms and and the same thing that you know when people sell in AI to the enterprise are saying we're freeing up people's time to do higher leverage work and like accounting and doing doing this stuff uh you know you're s just sort of like getting the state of things by by understanding like crop yields and things like that.

And then I I imagine this is freeing up labor to like actually take action to increase yields and fight off uh pests and things like that that that uh actually impact the bottom line. Yeah.

You know, the big thing is, you know, not only is it freeing up labor from, you know, having to go out and do this counting and sampling work, but the perhaps the the more important thing that's actually being, you know, done in the immediate ROI a lot of our farmers can see is actually reduction in labor costs and crop inputs.

Because right now what you know this is a bit of a simplification but what happens across a lot of these farms is that you know a farmer who's managing millions of trees and thousands of acres might go out and say hey you know this is like one you know 50 acre plot of land I'm going to do the exact same thing to every one of the 50,000 trees in this 50 acre plot of land when in reality half the trees might only need half the amount of you know pesticides or pruning or you know fertilizers you know whatever it is they might be applying or doing to those trees.

So it's very one-sizefits-all and you know we can tell these farmers things like hey wait a minute in this half of this block it only needs you know half the amount of pruning you only need to send half the amount of workers into that half and suddenly you're saving 25% of labor costs in that block.

So you know that's probably one of the first big things that a lot of our customers notice when they use our technology is just this you know ability to see where you need more of something and where you need less of something else. And you can see pretty immediate labor and cost savings just from that alone.

But you know in in the long run we have this I guess this conception of what we call like an AI farmer which is that if we can see you know tens or hundreds or you know like billions of of trees across their entire life cycles across multiple seasons we can start training large embedding models on all of this data that can basically farm or know how to farm better than any human ever could because it has so much experience.

And you know from there it's like what could we do with that right we get down to the tree level and like prescribe you know individual recommendations to what every single plant in a farm needs and that's super exciting to me and I think that's ultimately where you know a lot of this technology is going to go over the next couple years.

It's amazing. I'm incredibly bullish on you and Orchard. Extremely bullish for Arowan too. Very exciting. Uh thank you so much for congrats Charlie. Uh it's uh it's great to to get the story and uh I'm sure you'll be back on very soon. We're excited for Amazing. Thank you, guys.

And send me Send me Send me your address, too. Uh DM. Yeah. I'll send you an Orchard hat. Yeah. In exchange for this. Yeah. We're going to need a robot to count and make sure nobody's overdosing on caffeine in this studio. That's That's a problem we have. We'll talk to you soon. Great talking.

Have a great rest of your day. Um what a legend. His product's called Fruit Scope. And we got to talk about no scopes. 360 no scopes. A Call of Duty movie is officially in the works. This could be the second movie that Jordy sees in his entire life after Boron. Borat will be the first one. Thank you.

Would you see the Call of Duty movie? Uh, so Paramount also has the rights to expand Call of Duty into a multi into a universe of multiple films and TV shows. I wouldn't just watch it. I would study it. Sit down and listen. I would sit down and listen to the Call of Duty movie.

The Call of Duty movie seems like a no-brainer. Seems awesome. Um, Dodford, a great YouTube creator, uh, says, "The sensible thing to do would be adapting Black Ops or Modern Warfare. Instead, I fear they'll do a Minecraft movieesque comedy with trick shots and noob tubes. " Uh, what do you think?

Do you think they're going to go slapstick comedy lighter PG-13 jokey or for kids? Or do you think they will actually try and make it like Blackhawk Down gritty serious like you know uh brain rot or I think I don't think they're going to go comedy. I think they're going to go uh Oh, Jordy saw Mountain Head.

Daniel's correcting me. That's true. I did. And I So this would be the third movie. I felt like I needed to give a review. Yeah. A watch. Yeah. And uh well, we'll have to give a review of the Call of Duty movie. Obviously, everyone will demand it. And listen uh well, we got to get over onto Substack.

We got to hop on with Philadelphia. That's right. Uh no, but we actually are going to do a live over on Substack right now. You can go watch us on Substack. You might already be watching on Substack. Uh we're going to be live with Emily Sunberg TB. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you. We'll see you tomorrow.

Have a great evening. Goodbye. Cheers.