Aerobotics

Aerobotics is a South African agricultural technology company, registered as Aerobotics (Pty) Ltd and based in Cape Town, that provides AI-based analytics for tree-crop and fruit producers. It was founded in 2014 by James Paterson, the company's CEO, and Benji Meltzer, its CTO. The company began by combining drone and satellite imagery with machine learning to give farmers a tree-by-tree view of orchard health, and has since extended into in-field and post-harvest fruit measurement for yield and size forecasting.

Early products included Aeroview, a software platform for tree-level health analysis, and the Aeroview Scout app, which guides farm staff to problem areas identified from aerial imagery. In 2019 the company added a yield management tool for fruit counting and size estimation in the US season. Its current product line includes TrueFruit Size (fruit sizing and size forecasting using measurements taken in the orchard), TrueFruit Grade (automated measurement of size, color and blemishes), TrueFruit Bin Scan (post-harvest size and quality classification of fruit in bins), Drone Scan (aerial tree-level analysis) and Pest & Disease monitoring. The platform combines AI-enabled measurements with user inputs so that growers, packers and marketers can plan harvests, packing and sales; the company says customers can raise packouts by up to 5% by hitting target size and quality. Supported crops are peach, pomegranate, lemon, kiwi, cherry, blueberry, avocado, orange and table grapes.

Aerobotics has received venture funding in several rounds: a USD 600,000 seed round in 2017, a Series A expanded to USD 4 million in 2019 led by Paper Plane Ventures, and an oversubscribed USD 17 million Series B in January 2021 led by Naspers Foundry, with participation from Cathay AfricInvest Innovation, FMO (the Dutch entrepreneurial development bank) and Platform Investment Partners. At the time of the Series B the company reported offices in the United States, Australia and Portugal, operations in 18 countries across Africa, the Americas, Europe and Australia, and the United States as its largest market. It also said it had processed imagery of 81 million trees and more than one million citrus fruits, and had filed two provisional US patent applications covering tree age estimation and yield prediction.

Aerobotics automates orchard scouting and crop measurement with aerial robotics and computer vision, replacing manual tree counts and fruit sampling with machine-generated data at the level of individual trees and fruit.