More and more machines and innovative software are being used to digitize labor-intensive farming practices and optimize food production, boosting growth in agricultural technology. As a sign of growing investor interest, Oxford, U.K.-based agricultural technology firm Gardin recently announced it had raised $10.8 million in a seed funding round, after raising $1.2 million in pre-seed funding earlier this year.
Commenting on the funding, Gardin Founder and CEO Dr. Sumanta Talukdar said that, with the technology that is becoming available, food can be better, tastier, and more secure. “What’s more, the systems that provide it, if managed sustainably, can contribute to the health of our planet rather than advance its decline,” Talukdar said.
Edel Coen, head of Dealflow at U.K.-based Molten Ventures, which led the funding round, added, “There are more people, more waste, and less land available than ever before: food security and sustainable food production are now enormous challenges we are experiencing on a global scale. Gardin’s technology enables a step-change in how and where food can be produced.”
Launched in 2020, the London-headquartered startup aims to optimize food production, using machine learning and remote optical sensors to provide growers with data to determine plant health instead of traditional farming methods which involve manually assessing or conducting chemical analyses that can be harmful to the produce. For example, Gardin’s optical sensors can accurately detect abnormal growth effects caused by underwatering at a much faster rate than would have been observed through naked eye inspections.
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