South African Agri-tech Startup, Aerobotics Announces new Platform for Growers
Aerobotics, a South African agri-tech startup, has launched a new yield management platform, providing growers with tools to measure, manage, and protect their yields.
Aerobotics, founded in Cape Town in 2014, uses aerial imagery from drones and satellites and combines it with machine learning algorithms to provide tree and wine farmers with early problem detection services and optimize crop performance.
Aeroview, the startup’s cloud-based application, provides farmers with insights, scout mapping, and other tools to mitigate pest and disease damage to tree and vine crops.
Aerobotics, which raised Series B funding in 2020, has collected perennial crop imagery from more than one million acres with over 200 growers over the past seven years to identify over 195 million plants.
Aerobotics has now launched a platform for measuring and tracking yields as an important evolution of its tools for managing nutrition and irrigation. Its mobile app enables growers to collect yield data on the ground, assisting in the development of recommendations and key management decisions to achieve target yields.
On the new yield management platform, the latest yield product uses tree, vine, or bush performance metrics to set up representative sampling locations. In the field, growers and their teams use the app to navigate to each geo-referenced tree, vine, or bush, where yield counts and sizes are digitally recorded before being extrapolated into variety and block-level reports on the platform.
The latest fruit measurement and tracking tool allows teams on the ground to spend up to 75% less time collecting 10 times more yield data by efficiently guiding them to the most representative locations and leveraging the computer vision-enabled mobile application. Customers are already uploading thousands of images per week, with usage increasing 15x in the last two months.
