Aigen Founders: Wealthy Wurden (CTO) and Kenny Lee (CEO)
Courtesy of Aigen
The Aigen element looks like a drawing table on heavy-duty tires. It moves repeatedly at about two miles per hour over farmland, using a sophisticated computer vision system to discover crops and unwanted botanical invaders.
With two-axis robotic arms positioned close to the bottom, Element can clear weeds out of the best way where they’ll dry before they will grow seeds and spread.
The robots, that are utilized in the fleet and are sized to suit the needs of a selected crop, run repeatedly for 12 to 14 hours without interruption and never need to be plugged in. They feature a lithium iron phosphate battery in addition to flexible solar panels which can be lighter than those typically used on rooftops. They’ll even work in the dead of night for around 4 hours or six hours in light to moderate rain – all without the emissions related to diesel-powered farm equipment.
The corporate behind the robots, Aigen, was founded by Wealthy Wurden, a formerTesla engineer together with former Proofpoint executive Kenny Lee in 2020.
According to the most recent data available from United States Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. pesticide use reached over 1.1 billion kilos a yr by 2012, almost 60% of which was herbicides. Glyphosate was essentially the most used energetic ingredient that yr, with between 270 and 290 million kilos used since 2001.
Reducing the over-reliance of livestock farmers on pesticides and the heavy use of chemicals in the worldwide food supply is of non-public importance to Wurden and Lee. Each the founders and a number of other employees of their 15-person team experienced serious health problems related to exposure to pesticides.
The Aigen element uses computer vision to detect and eliminate weeds without the usage of pesticides.
Courtesy of Aigen
Wurden, who’s the CTO of Aigen, comes from a family of farmers who grew sugar beets in Minnesota. Now, he says, his family farm grows sorghum and soybeans.
“My pancreas suddenly stopped producing insulin once I was 15,” he said. He all the time suspected pesticide exposure, which is related to the next risk of diabetes, was an element.
As a sort 1 diabetic, he has been living with an insulin pump on daily basis since his diagnosis, keeping his environmental health in mind.
Prior to becoming an entrepreneur, Wurden worked as a mechanical engineer and on battery technology at Tesla, helping to create the battery pack present in the corporate’s best-selling Model 3 and Y vehicles and the flagship Model S sedan. He later joined an electrical boat startup called Pure Watercraft in Seattle, where he says he caught something of the startup bug.
Lee, who’s the CEO of Aigen, overcame non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a young man and says he’s occupied with each personal and planetary health after a profession in cybersecurity where he was more focused on making the web a safer place for everybody. (Lee co-founded Weblife.io, which was acquired by Proofpoint in a deal price around $60 million in 2017.)
Wurden and Lee met on a Slack channel called Work on Climate, where tech veterans discussed how to change or advance their careers while tackling the climate crisis.
Data collection for pest and water evaluation
Farmers want to have the opportunity to pinpoint exactly when and where insects appear, in order that they will, for instance, eliminate those who pose a threat. In addition they want irrigation-related analytics that may tell them if their plants are getting enough water and if some parts of the sphere might need more irrigation than others.
Normally, a fleet of Elemental droids flew over the sphere repeatedly, collecting data every time. Currently, the system can provide what farmers call “stand counts” by analyzing what number of healthy plants are in a field.
The Aigen element runs on solar and wind power, completely off-grid. It also runs its analytics and AI machine learning software on the device slightly than within the cloud. For this reason, Lee said, the corporate has the potential to provide farmers with more detailed crop evaluation.
“While we’re doing weeding activities, we will do other things that no other agtech can do because we’re mobile on the bottom.”
Aigen agricultural robots run on solar and wind power, with a lithium iron phosphate battery.
Courtesy of Aigen
The element may also help farmers address the continuing agricultural labor shortage and keep their crops healthy even during extreme heat that may keep people in the sphere while weeding.
According to Trent Eidem, who has contracted Aigen Element to work at his sugar beet farm near Fargo, the robots are also attractive because they will reduce the amount of cash growers have to spend on costly “inputs,” namely herbicides. Input and energy are its biggest budget items, said Eidem.
Next yr, the corporate plans to construct and deliver more of its robots to farmers, in addition to develop additional capabilities for them.
Aigen raised roughly $7 million in early-stage funding and extra grants from the state of Idaho to develop its system.
Investors include technology and climate-focused seed and enterprise funds: NEA, Global Founders, Regen Ventures, Bessemer, Climate Tech VC, Cleveland Ave. and a climate fund founded by the formergoal manager Mike Schroepfer.
NEA partner Andrew Schoen, who invests in recent technologies, told CNBC that Aigen’s track record in each software and hardware, and the power to construct an “autonomous ground robot” before raising any funds, gave him the boldness to invest. He also said Aigen solves an enormous problem for farmers, representing a potentially huge market.
According to forecasts by Fortune Business Insights, the worldwide marketplace for pesticides, or “plant protection products”, is anticipated to exceed $80 billion by 2028. The investor increasingly believes that agricultural producers will include robotics of their assortment, and never just chemicals.