Beagle Technology Inc.

Beagle Technology Inc. (Beagle Tech) is a California agricultural robotics company that adds AI vision and robotic control to conventional tractor-mounted equipment. It was founded in 2021 by engineer Yang Fang, who had worked on autonomous tractors from 2016 before refocusing on the high cost of skilled pruning labour. Beagle has offices in Dublin and Santa Maria, California, and says its systems are field-proven in California and Washington.

The core technology, See and Cut, uses cameras and real-time image processing to locate plant structure and drive hydraulic cutting tools at the right position while the tractor travels at normal speed. The AI Control Box is claimed to achieve 1/8-inch control accuracy using real-time camera vision, mounts on any tractor without calibration and handles multiple rows simultaneously. The vineyard range includes the B100 multifunctional pruner for quadrilateral trellis systems, convertible with brush kits to shoot thinning and sucker removal, and the B200 two-row pruner for high-wire, VSP and California sprawl trellises; cameras capture about four images per second and onboard computers control hydraulic cylinders to cut at the correct height. The V100 vegetable harvester applies the same approach to romaine and iceberg lettuce, celery, napa cabbage and bok choy, detecting each plant's heart and adjusting cut height; the company estimates throughput of about 16,600 heads per day over 7.5 productive hours. Beagle claims labour cost reductions of at least 50%.

In 2022 Beagle became the fifth start-up to graduate from the NEC X Corporate Accelerator Program. At that time NEC reported that its patent-pending pruning and shoot-thinning system had been tested on 400 acres of pruning and a paid 250-acre shoot-thinning trial with a Washington grower, with about 25% lower pruning cost and 70% lower shoot-thinning cost, and five wine grape grower customers including The Wine Group and Foley Family Farm. Customer logos on its site include The Wine Group, Foley Family Wines, Constellation Brands and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources. Investors shown include Ospraie Ag Science, TSVC, AIX Ventures, Yuantai Investment Partners and NEC X, with Google's Jeff Dean and WuFu Chen named as backers; the company has raised a Series A, about USD 9.2 million in total.