May 25, 2016

Switzerland-based agtech startup, Gamaya, has announced that it has raised CHF3.2 million (US$3.23 million) in a series A round of funding. Investors in the round included Sandoz Foundation, Nestlé chairman, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Seed4Equity, and the Swiss venture capital firm, VI Partners.

Gamaya, which was launched out of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), integrates patented hyperspectral cameras and artificial intelligence into its drone technology platform that can detect the spectrum of the land that the human eye cannot.

This ability enables Gamaya to give soybean, corn, and sugarcane farmers early-detection warnings for diseases, pests, and weeds, while also enabling the company to determine optimum rates of fertilizer application and to estimate crop yields. The information collected is delivered in the form of ‘action maps’ that a farmer can take into the field and which can be integrated into farm management platforms or delivered to field machinery to calibrate crop treatments such as chemical sprays for fertilizer applications.

“There is a clear imperative to address the food challenge in a sustainable manner,” said Taha Ben Mrad, founder and CEO of Seed4equity. “Consuming better also requires to produce better at all level of the food value chain,”

“Gamaya has all the ingredients to become an instrumental actor of this change by combining state of the art technological building blocks (data, software and hardware) at the service of the Mother Nature. Farmers and further actors of this ecosystem will perceive significant qualitative and quantitative benefits.”

Other drone companies have also gained backing, including Seattle-based MicaSense, which recently raised an additional $7.4 million in February from global drone company, Paris-based Parrot, to fund the development of its agricultural drone technologies.

Additionally, agricultural equipment manufacturer, AGCO Corp., entered into a strategic partnership with Boulder-based Agribotix LLC in September 2015 to launch an integrated, drone-driven agricultural intelligence and data solutions system, and in July of last year, Nixon Robotics announced it was set to launch Australia’s first drone service for the country’s agriculture sector, government agencies, and firefighters.

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GAI News staff