- Orchard Robotics announced an oversubscribed $22 million Series A led by Quiet Capital and Shine Capital with participation from General Catalyst, Contrary, Mythos, Valyrian, Ravelin, and others, bringing total funding to over $25 million.
- Founded in 2022 by Thiel Fellow Charlie Wu, the company aims to solve agriculture’s critical data gap with its AI-powered FruitScope Vision System and FruitScope Vault & OS, providing precise, field-level insights for farm management.
- Orchard’s technology is already deployed across major U.S. apple and grape farms and is expanding to other crops, with plans to double its workforce and open a San Francisco office to support global growth.
PRESS RELEASE – Orchard Robotics, the AI Farming Company, have announced its oversubscribed $22M Series A funding. The round was led by Quiet Capital and Shine Capital, with continued participation from General Catalyst, Contrary, Mythos, Valyrian, Ravelin, and other world-class investors such as F1 World Champion Nico Rosberg and Yext & Roam Founder Howard Lerman, bringing the company’s total funding to over $25M.
Founded in 2022 by Thiel Fellow Charlie Wu, Orchard is tackling one of the most significant challenges in modern agriculture: the lack of precise, field-level data.
Every decision a farmer makes is based on knowing what is growing in their fields. Even nowadays, the largest farms rely on manual sampling (covering less than 0.01% of their crop) to make multi-million dollar decisions about labor, crop inputs, farm management, sales, supply chain, and more. This data gap leads to massive inefficiencies and economic losses at a time when labor and input costs have dramatically risen, and farm efficiency has flatlined.
“Agriculture hasn’t fundamentally evolved in the last 20 years, despite dramatic increases in costs,” said Wu. “Solving farming is a data problem, and data is the bedrock of every farming decision. But the lack of precise, actionable data is the bottleneck. Orchard Robotics exists to help our farmers become more profitable and efficient, and this new funding accelerates our ability to deliver a sustainable future for agriculture.”
The company’s first product is the OS for precision crop management, consisting of:
- The FruitScope Vision System: An AI-powered camera system that mounts onto any tractor or farm vehicle, capturing millions of images and using state-of-the-art AI to analyze every visible detail of each tree, vine, or plant across a farm.
- FruitScope Vault & OS: A definitive system-of-record for the farm that tracks the growth, health and yield of millions of plants, paired with Orchard’s industry-leading software platform where farmers view their data, make the best decisions, and command and control every facet of field operations – from labor to crop input application and harvest outcomes.
“In our diligence, we heard a consistent story from farmers: they are forced to make critical decisions based on imprecise data. The status quo is no longer sustainable,” said Michael Bloch, Partner at Quiet Capital, who is joining Orchard’s board. “Orchard is providing the ground truth this massive industry has desperately needed, turning guesswork into data-driven precision. We believe they will become an essential partner for every modern farm.”
Today, the company’s technology is deployed across many of America’s leading apple and grape farms, and has recently expanded into blueberries, cherries, almonds, pistachios, citrus, and strawberries.
To support its rapid growth, the company is hiring aggressively, planning to double its team by the end of the year and opening a new office in San Francisco to better serve its expanding customer base both across the U.S. and globally.
