After a successful launch of the FruitScout precision crop load management SaaS offering in early 2021, the company will expand team and support for new crops.

YAKIMA, WA, USA, September 22, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ -- FruitScout, the world’s first mobile-based, AI-powered precision crop load management (PCLM) platform, today announced $4 million in seed round funding led by Bowery Capital and TFX Capital with additional capital from SaaS Ventures, among others.

FruitScout’s innovative approach to precision crop load management combines their patented computer vision processing system with the ease and accessibility of phone-based data collection, allowing growers increased per-acre profitability while reducing labor costs and improving sustainability.

The funding follows a successful launch this past spring of the FruitScout platform for apples and agave. The first company of its kind in agtech to secure venture backing, FruitScout will use the funds to expand its engineering, field service, and go-to-market teams.

“What excited us most about FruitScout is its opportunity to not just transform how apples and agave are grown, which is huge in itself, but their potential to make all agricultural crops more predictable, profitable and sustainable using nothing more than a mobile phone,” said Loren Straub, general partner at Bowery Capital, who led the round and will join the firm’s board.

FruitScout’s PCLM Cloud platform replaces both traditional manually-intensive counting and sizing techniques and prohibitively expensive, specialized tractor- and drone-mounted cameras, making precision crop load management accessible to both industrial-scale and family growers for the first time.

“We’ve embraced precision crop load management because it is transforming the apple business. FruitScout listens to us and gives us information in the way we think about it without requiring us to change our existing practices. They instead allow us to scale those practices, and the benefits they provide, to a whole new level. We can collect more data faster with FruitScout with no capital outlays,” said Dan Plath, President of Washington Fruit and Produce, one of the world’s top growers of apples.

Mark Boyer, owner of Ridgetop Orchards in Fishertown, Pennsylvania and FruitScout customer says, “FruitScout isn’t just replacing manual counting and sizing. They provide me with a way to manage to specific targets that improve both the margins and predictability of my business. And all I need is a phone and an account to get started.”

“What has impressed us most about AFS is that the team has developed a solution for outdoor growers--not coming at it from just a bits and bytes perspective-- but by being in the dirt with the customers to understand the nuances of their problems, their workflows, and their requirements in an industry which is still largely driven by clipboards and excel sheets,” said Kevin Eckert, partner at TFX Capital. Matt Abrams, also with TFX, will join the board.

“FruitScout got its start in the orchards of central Washington and Chile, not in an office with a bunch of programmers. We spent three years learning how growers operated and what they considered priorities. Then we built a system that matched those needs. FruitScout measures every phase of a crop’s lifecycle and presents the actionable information to growers so they can manage their operations the way they like and to the targets they set,” said Matthew King, CEO and founder of FruitScout.

About FruitScout
Founded in 2019 in the apple orchards of Washington state and Chile, FruitScout is on a mission to make precision crop load management accessible to growers of crops around the world. PCLM has been proven to improve harvest quality, predictability, and profitability but previously suffered from a lack of cost-effective data gathering techniques. FruitScout solves this by combining phone-based data collection with its patented Fruit Recognition System to capture and process photos and generate the data that feeds the PCLM Dashboard.

Tony Falco
FruitScout
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