The interest in agritech is on a rise seeing how Sachin Bansal has opened up BAC Acquisitions to acquire smaller firms focusing on the segment. He even poured in $7 million in the firm to facilitate the same.
Taking further this trend of agritech focussed investment, several top-notch VCs and a slew of angel investors have together invested Rs 15 crore ($2 million) in TartanSense, an agriculture robotics startup.
The VCs participating in the seed round include Omnivore Partners, Blume Ventures and BEENEXT. Angels pouring in the rest of the money counted Dileep George, co-founder of Vicarious AI – that in itself is backed by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
Akash Gupta and Samay Kohli, co-founders of GreyOrange and Kush Jawahar from Featherlite also joined in to invest in TartanSense.
Looking at the class of VCs and HNIs funding the company, a question sprouts regarding what does it do.
TartanSense, is a robotics startup that leverages deep tech to facilitate robotic solutions to the agriculture economy. For now, it is working on creating small robots that have an optimized vision to weed out the damaged, diseased, and infectious crops in an effective and precise manner.
The first product in this line will be BrijBot, that will specialise in spraying on weeds in cotton plants, and bring a 70 per cent reduction in the cost of the process.
This, the founder think, will help the farmers save cost and time to focus on other important functions. The AI in these robots will enable detailed spraying that also saves on chemicals and pollution. A technique already being used in the West is supposed to improve agriculture economics by over 10X for the farmers.
The next line of products will focus on the harvesting function in the agriculture economy.
As per the ET report, the founder and CEO, Jaisimha Rao, believes that the initiatives will democratise the availability of high-level tech in agriculture. The segment in India employs 60 per cent of the population but only produces 15 per cent of GDP.
