By Lynda Kiernan
FruitSpec, a portfolio company of The Trendlines Group in Israel, announced it has secured $4 million in funding from South African agtech investor AgVentures, and Hubei Forbon Technology Co. Ltd. of China.
The ability to accurately estimate fruit yield is key when making business decisions connected to crop handling and sales, however, a lack of accuracy has remained a critical challenge within the fresh food supply chain.
Historically, efforts to integrate technology into green fruit yield estimation have been limited by the inability of platforms to distinguish the difference between green fruit and green leaves in an image. This limitation has left farm workers to visually sample a chosen few fruit trees to estimate total crop yields.
FruitSpec is able to address this issue using patented hyperspectral and computer vision algorithms that enable the startup to count the number of fruit, as well as estimate fruit sizes, resulting in accurate early season yield estimation.
“FruitSpec seamlessly addresses a critical pain point within the fruit market value chain, and its value proposition is easily grasped by industry players,” said Michael Prinsloo, with AgVentures. “FruitSpec’s solution is not merely an incremental improvement to existing industry norms, but a total disruption of the inaccurate and labour-intensive methods currently used.”
With demonstrated accuracy rates exceeding 95 percent, FruitSpec is positioned to bring major advancement to fruit yield estimation abilities for a global market consisting of 116 million acres of fruit orchards and vineyards, which the company estimates translates to a market potential of $3 billion.
The company plans to use the funds to pursue expansion and to broaden its services to its customer base.
“The investment from AgVentures and Forbon is a vote of confidence for the market problem we are solving with FruitSpec’s technology,” said Raviv Kula, CEO, FruitSpec.
“We see this investment as a clear illustration of AgVentures’ vision of investing in scalable technologies that disrupt legacy business models within the agricultural and food industries,” noted Prinsloo. “We look forward to our journey with FruitSpec and have full confidence in the team’s ability to roll the solution out across a global stage,”
As Israel’s leading agtech accelerator, The Trendlines Group is responsible for advancing some of the most promising startups affecting sustainability in agriculture, and FruitSpec is not its only portfolio company to recently go on to raise additional capital.
In March of this year, Trendlines announced that portfolio company BioFishency, a developer and producer of cost-effective, intuitive water treatment systems for land-based aquaculture operations, had raised $2.4 million through a round in which the primary investors were a private investor from China, Dutch global investment fund Aqua-Spark, and the Trendlines Group.
For FruitSpec investor Forbon, which anticipates supporting the startup’s entry into China, FruitSpec’s technology represents not only a great potential benefit to growers, but a platform that will have a much wider effect upon the market.
“We strongly believe that FruitSpec’s technology and services will not only change the current practices in orchard management and logistics, but revolutionize them,” said Renzong Wang, chairman and CEO, Hubei Forbon Technology Co. Ltd.
“Given the fact that in China apples are already traded as a future commodity in the exchange market, and more agricultural produce will be listed in the near future, the information provided by FruitSpec will be invaluable for the participants in the market. We are anxiously anticipating FruitSpec’s entry into the huge Chinese market with our support, to serve all the stakeholders who will benefit from their services – growers, packing houses, logistics, and sellers.”
– Lynda Kiernan is Editor with GAI Media and daily contributor to GAI News. If you would like to submit a contribution for consideration, please contact Ms. Kiernan at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com