TartanSense, which makes “small robots for small farms”, has raised $5 million in a Series A funding round led by FMC Ventures and Omnivore along with participation of existing investor Blume Ventures. The agritech startup has now raised a total of $7 million, including a $2-million seed round in March 2019.
According to the Bengaluru-based startup, the funding proceeds in this round will be used for expanding its business and growth.
Founded in 2015 by Jaisimha Rao, TartanSense builds small agricultural robots, equipped with artificial intelligence-assisted computer vision, to help small farms reduce their expenditures and improve their incomes. These small robots are affordable and their precise operations in all farming activities—from sowing to harvesting—bring down cultivation costs while improving crop yields.
“TartanSense is helping smallholder farmers who struggle with low yields, primarily driven by two reasons: poor chemical spraying techniques and unreliable farm labour. Our mission is to make smallholder farmers wealthier by shipping monetizable robots,” Rao said.
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TartanSense will have the world’s largest fleet of agriculture robots in the next 18 months. We are grateful to have amazing investors like FMC Ventures, Omnivore, and Blume Ventures backing us in our passion to empower farmers, he added.
The company claims that its latest robot, BladeRunner can identify, precisely locate, and mechanically uproot undesirable weeds as well as spot spray on the desired crop, reducing chemical usage by 45% along with increasing weeding efficiency by seven-folds, reported Entrackr.
According to TartanSense, India is the biggest producer of cotton in the world, with 33 million acres under cultivation and an average weeding expenditure of $100 per acre. The market potential only for weeding in cotton is more than $3 billion annually. TartanSense aims to focus on cotton as well as several other crops with high cost of weeding.
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