Agritech robotics startup TartanSense raises $5 mn in Series-A funding

TartanSense builds small agricultural robots, equipped with AI-assisted computer vision, to help small farms prune expenses and improve incomes

Agritech robotics startup TartanSense has raised $5 million in Series A funding in a round led by FMC Ventures and Omnivore, with participation from existing investor Blume Ventures.  

This brings the total funds raised by the company to $7 million, after it raised $2 million in a seed round in March 2019. TartanSense builds small agricultural robots, equipped with AI-assisted computer vision, to help small farms reduce expenses and improve incomes.

Jaisimha Rao, founder, TartanSense, said, “Our mission is to make small-holder farmers wealthier by shipping monetisable robots. TartanSense will have the world’s largest fleet of agriculture robots in the next 18 months. We are grateful to have amazing investors like FMC Ventures, Omnivore, and Blume Ventures backing us in our passion to empower farmers.”

TartanSense is helping smallholder farmers who struggle with low yields, primarily driven by two reasons - poor chemical spraying techniques and unreliable farm labour. TartanSense's robots are precision agriculture solutions for all major farming activities--sowing, spraying, weeding, and harvesting--which simultaneously drive down cultivation costs while improving crop yields.

BladeRunner, TartanSense’s latest robot, can identify, precisely locate, and mechanically uproot weeds as well as spot-spray the desired crop, reducing chemical usage by 45 per cent and increasing weeding efficiency seven fold.

Amar Singh, Managing Director at FMC Ventures, remarked, “TartanSense is a pioneer in ground-based precision spraying in India. With growers’ interest in mind, it has developed a unique, low-cost precision application technology with a very high level of accuracy. FMC Ventures is excited to support TartanSense as they combine artificial intelligence and robotics to improve how growers apply crop inputs.”

Based in Bengaluru, TartanSense was founded in 2015 by Jaisimha Rao, an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University who returned to India after working as a quant on Wall Street. He soon assembled a core team of Carnegie Mellon alumni with rich experience in robotics, computer, electrical, and mechanical engineering. The Carnegie Mellon linkage at TartanSense even extends to the company name since students and alumni of CMU are referred to as Tartans.

India is the largest grower of cotton in the world, with 33 million acres under cultivation and an average weeding expenditure of $100 an acre. The market potential only for weeding in cotton is over $3 billion a year. TartanSense aims to focus on cotton and several other crops that entail high cost of weeding.