©AppHarvest
Agtech company AppHarvest has acquired agricultural robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) company, Root AI, in a deal valued at $60 million.
Founded in 2019, Root AI creates intelligent robots to help manage high-tech indoor farms. The acquisition will boost AppHarvest’s intelligent tools to produce food sustainability and increase efficiency.
As part of the deal, AppHarvest will gain access to Root AI’s signature robot Virgo. According to the press release, Virgo is the world’s first universal harvester, which can be configured to identify and harvest multiple crops of varying sizes including tomatoes and peppers and more delicate fruits such as strawberries.
AppHarvest expects to take advantage of the data the robots can collect as they harvest, helping to evaluate crop health, predict yield and optimise overall operations of the controlled environment agriculture facility. This includes improving a number of sustainability efforts such as detecting and eliminating pests naturally and helping indoor farms successfully grow chemical pesticide-free fruits and vegetables.
With its network of indoor farms, AppHarvest is focused on farming more sustainably using 90% less water than open-field agriculture and only recycled rainwater.
“Farming as we’ve known it is broken because of the increasing number of variables such as extreme weather, droughts, fire and contamination by animals that make our food system unreliable. Indoor farming solves for many of those challenges, and the data gathered can exponentially deliver more insights that help us predict and control crop quality and yield,” said AppHarvest founder and CEO, Jonathan Webb.
Root AI co-founder and CEO, Josh Lessing will join AppHarvest as chief technology officer. Meanwhile, co-founder Ryan Knopf will take on the role of VP of technology at AppHarvest.
Lessing sad: “Enhanced data collection for each plant through the robot can lead to insights that teach us precisely how to design better, more resilient food systems that are reliable and that produce more food with fewer resources.
“Joining forces with AppHarvest is a natural fit: we want to ensure a stable, safe supply of the nutritious and healthy food that people should be eating – grown sustainably – and doing that at the scale of AppHarvest gives us the opportunity to make the greatest difference.”
© FoodBev Media Ltd 2024