Los Alamos, New Mexico-based Image technology startup, Descartes Labs, announced it has raised $5 million in a Series A led by Cultivian Sandbox, and involving Crosslink Capital, Data Collective, TenOneTen Ventures, and ValueStream Labs, reports Venturebeat.com.

 

Spun out of Los Alamos National Laboratory last year, Decartes Labs uses satellite imagery to make predictions. The technology employs a form of artificial intelligence called ‘deep learning’ that uses training systems called artificial neural networks on large amounts of data, such as a large number of satellite images. The neural networks can make inferences about what will happen, helping companies and customers answer agriculture-related questions. Descartes Labs states that using its technology, it can make more accurate forecasts than the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

 

To give an idea of just how advanced this technology is, and the accuracy it can claim, Descartes Labs co-founder and chief executive, Mark Johnson explained in a LinkedIn post, “The USDA estimates that the corn harvest will be 13.6 billion bushels this year, which works out to a bit over a million billion corn kernels. Each kernel weighs about 280 milligrams. Descartes Labs is able to predict the corn harvest to an accuracy near 99%, which means we are using satellites orbiting above the corn fields to effectively measure the weight of the average kernel of corn to better than 3 milligrams, an error which is roughly the weight of a grain of sand.”

 

Descartes Labs is not the first venture to employ deep learning, however it is the first to apply the technology to agriculture. Johnson explains in his LinkedIn post, "Why ag? Global agriculture is a trillion dollar business that is absolutely essential to the lives of all 7 billion of us living on this planet.  Human agriculture is visible from space, but traditional methods of understanding and forecasting agriculture are mostly stuck in the last century, based on paper surveys of farmers and visits to crops growing in the fields. Since the dawn of the United States, mechanization and biotechnology have multiplied the productivity of the American farm by an enormous factor, and the new frontier in this technological revolution is information."

 

This round of fundraising has brought its total amount raised to-date to $8.78 million.