FARMWISE

Sebastien Boyer grew up on a farm in France and went on to MIT and Stanford before co-founding FarmWise. The problem he targeted was immediate: weeding in vegetable crops is one of the most labor-intensive, expensive, and herbicide-dependent activities in agriculture.

A head of lettuce requires 40-80 human hours of weeding per acre. Labor is scarce and expensive in California's Central Valley (where most US lettuce and broccoli is grown).

Herbicide regulations are tightening. FarmWise built a robot — the Titan — that drives through rows of vegetables using LiDAR and computer vision to distinguish crop from weed, then mechanically removes the weed without chemicals or human labor.

FarmWise sells agricultural robots — specifically a tractor-towed robotic weeding platform that drives autonomously through vegetable fields and removes weeds using computer vision and precision mechanical tooling. Farmers pay for the robot-as-a-service (per acre weeded) rather than purchasing expensive capital equipment.

Revenue comes from service contracts on a per-acre basis.

Titan robotic weeding system, FarmWise precision agriculture data platform, robot-as-a-service field contracts

FarmWise focused on the largest commercial vegetable farms in California and Arizona, targeting operations with 500+ acres of mixed vegetables — customers with enough scale to make the economics work and enough labor headaches to motivate adoption. It expanded to the Salinas Valley (the US lettuce capital) and built partnerships with large produce growers.

Acquired by CNH Industrial in 2023.

Agricultural robots are capital-intensive to build and iterate on. Farming economics are thin — farmers operate on 3-7% margins and are deeply price-sensitive.

The robot-as-a-service pricing helps, but FarmWise had to prove that the per-acre cost of its robot service was competitive with human labor costs and the operational headache of finding seasonal workers. Field conditions (mud, varied row spacing, crop damage) make precision robotics harder than warehouse robotics.

Playground Global, Yamaha Motor Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Agronomics