When Valeria Kogan began her doctoral work. In 2017, after graduating with a level in bioinformatics, the scientific field that uses computers and software to research biological data, she imagined her profession would all the time be within the fields of mathematics, medicine or biology. But after the primary AI boom within the late 2010s, she got an interesting opportunity in a sector she had never considered: agriculture.
Kogan (pictured top center) told TechCrunch that she was curious when she was approached by a friend of a friend, a tomato grower, who was in search of someone knowledgeable about AI who could help apply the technology to agriculture. When she heard that they wanted to make use of AI to watch plant health, she realized that much of her bioinformatics knowledge was transferable.
“When they began telling me concerning the challenges they faced: plants being healthy and their health being necessary, and how you can monitor the health of plants, it was clear that the challenge was technically very similar,” Kogan said . “You wish to see and make the diagnosis as quickly as possible.”
She decided to begin Stop in 2020. The Tel Aviv-based startup uses computer vision and AI to watch and diagnose greenhouse crops with diseases or pests. Fermata's software works with any commercially available camera and takes pictures of the plants in a greenhouse twice a day. Its in-house AI model analyzes the pictures and sends warnings of infestation or disease to farmers via an app.
Kogan acknowledged that corporations seeking to introduce AI to farms have struggled to achieve significant traction up to now. While she's not convinced her company has gained significant market share thus far, she believes Fermata's approach has allowed the team to achieve momentum for several reasons.
For one thing, she said, they approached the market with real curiosity and wanted to search out out what greenhouse farms needed, relatively than attempting to sell them technology they didn't want.
“The original idea I had was that we construct the robots that move across the greenhouse, and we even built the primary project,” Kogan said. “We made the primary mistake, we built things before talking to anyone, and it's still in my dad's garage. When we began talking to people, we realized that nobody needed this, the robot was a foul idea.”
She added that their approach to training their AI model also likely helped them stand out. From the start, Fermata has kept its data labeling team in-house relatively than outsourcing it, to which Kogan attributes the corporate's accuracy. When they began, they used publicly available data, but now they train their models using their customers' data and have a research and development center where additionally they infect plants with various diseases.
“We love customers who’ve lots of problems because they provide us lots of data, especially after they have terminal illnesses,” Kogan said, followed by amusing. “We're like, okay, let's take the decision seriously and that we're fearful because that is bad news for them, but for us it's amazing news.”
When Fermata got here to market, Kogan said they thought it made sense to partner with corporations that were already selling to farms. When Fermata began in 2020, this approach didn't get much traction, but as AI gained traction in 2022, that modified. Fermata now works directly with farms, but in addition works with large agribusinesses like Bayer and Syngenta together. The company declined to disclose growth metrics but has deployed greater than 100 cameras.
Fermata also recently raised a $10 million Series A round. The $10 million got here entirely from Raw Ventures, a European VC. The company was an existing investor and Kogan said that after they set out to lift this current round, they didn’t feel the necessity to dilute the cap table with additional investors.
The round can be used to assist the corporate scale and achieve its goal of being profitable by 2026. Kogan said they’ve been in a position to grow and not using a sales team and largely through inbound interest, but wish to expand their sales team. Fermata currently only works with greenhouse-grown tomatoes, but is actively working to expand into latest crops and expand its partnerships.
