April 22, 2021

By Lynda Kiernan, Global AgInvesting Media

Following 18 months of intensive R&D with partners across a range of high-value crops, Guardian Agriculture comes out of stealth with $10.5 million in Seed funding led by Leaps by Bayer, and backed by FMC Ventures, Cavallo Ventures, Fall Line Capital, MIT affiliated E14 Fund, Pillar VC, and Neoteny. 

This capital brings Guardian’s total funding to-date to $15.5 million.

Located in Massachusetts, and led by a team with deep experience in autonomous systems from Apple, Otto, and Uber, Guardian is the developer of eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) – the first-ever integrated, U.S.-manufactured, commercial-scale precision application system purpose-built for agriculture.

Through its work, the company is addressing one of the most challenging issues being faced by farmers – how to safely, effectively, and sustainably protect crops while traditional chemical approaches are reaching their limits of efficacy and are the source of negative environmental effects. The answer is to be found in new, more targeted technologies.

“We think of Guardian Agriculture as a crop protection technology that uses robotics to do more with less and do it safely and sustainably,” said Amar Singh, managing director, FMC Ventures. “They’re a deeply technical team that fundamentally redesigned the system to optimize it for aerial application.”

This platform developed by Guardian is the first solution able to marry data on crop health with the means to take action, closing the gap between acknowledging a problem and addressing it in the field.

“Reducing the environmental impact of agriculture is a key focus area of ours,” said Juergen Eckhardt, head of Leaps by Bayer. “By integrating data and insight with tools large enough to service commercial farms, Guardian Agriculture delivers crop protection that improves farmer profitability while simultaneously minimizing environmental side effects.”

For users, Guardian’s crop protection system needs no additional technology advances or changes to infrastructure, making adoption immediate and practical.

“We can use eVTOL technology to deliver a step-change in crop protection today, and then expand to other areas in the future,” said Jeff Sparks, COO, Guardian Agriculture.

Habib Haddad, managing partner of the MIT-affiliated E14 Fund, agreed, saying, “We believe in the ability of eVTOL to open the sky as infrastructure, and don’t need to wait for urban air mobility to become a reality. Guardian Agriculture is able to deploy its eVTOL system in the near term, and in doing so they’re building a huge advantage in experience, autonomous flight hours and data.”

Clay Mitchell, co-founder and managing director of Fall Line Capital, detailed the destructive chain of events sparked by airplane-delivered applications, resulting in erosion of denuded ditch banks and field edges, and widespread resistance that cut into yields and farmers’ bottom lines.

“With the entire Guardian Agriculture solution engineered around precise control of the droplet from nozzle to target, the true aim of crop protection is recaptured,” said Mitchell. “Deploying this technology across our national portfolio of farmland is critical for both our farms and our ecosystem.”

The capital from this investment will support Guardian as it accelerates the development, production, and capacity of its crop protection system to meet initial demand – having built up a backlog of service reservation agreements valued at $20 million from farmers and farm operators across the U.S.

“This is the first new aerial technology to make a material impact on American farms,” said Mike Wilbur, CEO, Wilbur-Ellis’ Cavallo Ventures. “We believe it can be profitably, and rapidly, deployed and are looking forward to working with Guardian Agriculture to roll out their technology to our customers and partners.”

– Lynda Kiernan is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She can be reached at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.