May 17, 2018

High-resolution agriculture aerial imagery provider Taranis has announced its acquisition of all assets of San Francisco-based Mavrx. The deal will add Mavrx’s UHR imagery solution to its existing product and services portfolio,  giving current Mavrx and Taranis clients access to a powerful combination of aerial imagery products and precision agriculture services for their fields.

Taranis will now manage more than 20 million acres on its precision agriculture intelligence platform. Mavrx sales and operations teams will join Taranis U.S. operations.

Ofir Schlam, CEO and co-founder of Taranis, noted, “Taranis is committed to serving all of its new and existing clients with the complementary product lines. We are especially excited about the synergy farmers will get immediately – UHR recognizing problematic zones, and AI² classifying every weed, insect and disease so farmers can get the ideal prescription and improve yield.”

With its fleet of 60 planes in 30 states across the U.S., Mavrx delivers 8cm-per-pixel resolution images capable of recognizing and classifying weeds, diseases, insects and nutrient deficiencies on a single leaf at a resolution of 0.5 millimeters from a plane while flying at 120 miles per hour or from drones at 30 miles per hour. In addition to imaging, Taranis provides variable-rate prescriptions, weather analysis with access to 220,000 weather stations, satellite imagery analysis, and disease prediction models.

Imaging Companies Attracting Attention 

There have been a number of recent deals in the space, including Syngenta’s acquisition of FarmShots, Inc., a North Carolina-based innovator of high-resolution satellite imagery that detects plant health by analyzing absorbed light from field images; and Oakland, California-based Ceres Imaging, an ag-focused aerial spectral imaging and analytics startup, recently secured an additional $2.5 million in Series A funding from Romulus Capital, bringing the total round to $7.5 million.

Arama Kukutai, Finistere Ventures partner and Taranis board member, who identified the acquisition opportunity, added, “Taranis is the technology leader in Ag aerial imagery, and we saw this acquisition adding to its footprint in the Americas, while also adding richer feature sets for farmers. We are happy to support the company in implementing the strategy of creating the platform that farmers want and need. With too many subscale players in digital Ag, this type of rollup is going to be more commonplace as the best-in-class players consolidate their position.”

David Nitchman, GAI Media