Orchard Robotics, a startup using AI and camera-equipped farm vehicles to analyze fruit crops, has raised $22 million in Series A funding led by Quiet Capital and Shine Capital, with participation from General Catalyst, Contrary, and others.
Founded in 2022 by Charlie Wu, a Thiel Fellow inspired by his grandparents’ apple farm in China, Orchard Robotics helps growers move beyond manual sampling by using tractor-mounted cameras to capture high-resolution images of fruits. Its AI then measures size, color, and health, feeding insights into cloud-based software that guides fertilization, pruning, and harvest planning.
Orchard’s system is already in use on some of the largest apple and grape farms in the U.S. and has recently expanded to blueberries, cherries, almonds, pistachios, citrus, and strawberries.
The company faces competition from Bloomfield Robotics (acquired by Kubota), Vivid Robotics, and Green Atlas, but Wu believes the market will expand as AI evolves from analyzing crops to making autonomous decisions across farming operations.
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“Our ambition is to be a lot more than just collecting data,” Wu said. “We want to collect the data, build an operating system on top of it, and eventually own all the workflows in the farm.”
