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Superhumans don't exist in the real world, but someday you might see super robots. Obviously, robots can be made that are stronger, faster, and better than humans, but do you think there is a limit to how much better we can make them?
Thanks to the ongoing developments in material science and soft robotics, scientists are now developing new technologies that could allow future robots to push the limits of non-human biology. For instance, a team of researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder recently developed a material that could give rise to soft robots capable of jumping 200 times above their own thickness. Grasshoppers, one of the most astonishing leapers on Earth, can leap into the air only up to 20 times their body lengths.
Despite outperforming the insects, the researchers behind the rubber-like jumping material say they took their inspiration from grasshoppers. Similar to the insect, the material stores large amounts of energy in the area and then releases it all at once while making a jump.
Based in the Netherlands, blossoming agtech startup Source.ag has announced a $23 million Series A funding round to help grow its business, less than a year after its previous, $10 million round. The company assists commercial greenhouse crop growers adjust their growing conditions, optimize their resources and maximize their yields by using state-of-the-art AI models to predict how their plants will grow under different conditions. Food production is both energy and water-intensive (“fun” fact: agricultural irrigation uses 70% of water worldwide) and with the global population expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, it strikes me that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to use a bit less water to grow our food.
The company is taking a bet on greenhouse agriculture being a sustainable, local and climate-resilient food production method that can provide a tailored environment for each specific crop. Source.ag’s technology, then, aims to enable growers to make better-informed decisions about their crops and greenhouses to facilitate more sustainable harvests.
Source.ag’s seed funding was used primarily for R&D and to develop Source Track, a software platform to assist growers in operating their facilities. It has worked with hundreds of users over thousands of acres of high-tech greenhouses, making it ripe for expansion. The Series A funding, led by Astanor Ventures and including investments from Acre Venture Partners and several of the Netherlands’ leading greenhouse operators, will enable the development of two new products: Source Cultivate and Source Control.
“We will release several new products in the next 24 months, including Source Cultivate, which will give growers unprecedented predictive powers and the ability to leverage AI in finding optimal growing strategies,” explains Rien Kamman, Source.ag’s co-founder and CEO. “In essence, we’re giving growers a crystal ball in which they can see how external factors and strategic decisions will impact the development of their crops, including the associated resource usage, costs and returns. Based on this we support growers finding the growth strategy that is right for them.”
“One of our customers in France already used Source Cultivate to simulate different pruning and climate strategies for its tomato crops, getting instant feedback from our AI how different strategies would impact plant health, yield and profit over the whole season,” Kamman adds. “This enabled the grower to find the perfect growing strategy — tailored to his geographic location, resource prices, facility type and seed genetics.”
The largest global fresh vegetable sectors, for example tomatoes and bell peppers, have been Source.ag’s main focus to date, but its aim is to assist all growers, everywhere, to manage the best harvest possible.
“Source.ag’s goal is to give growers and farmers similar superpowers for growing their crops. Source.ag will be able to provide real-time advice on how to best grow crops, no matter what you grow or how you grow it,” says Kamman. “It’s mind-boggling that there are 3 billion people that do not have access to sufficient fresh produce.”
To the company’s founder, Source.ag is about the democratization of agricultural knowledge through AI, allowing the cultivation of fresh fruits and vegetables in the most efficient and sustainable way possible.
“I believe Source.ag is uniquely positioned to ‘bridge the gap’ between the digital world of AI and the real world of plants, growers and farming,” Kamman says. “We have deep experience in building applied AI, and we’ve been able to attract top talent who collaborate closely with the best growers in the world.”
Kamman and his co-founder, Ernst van Bruggen, had been building AI systems for large corporations for many years, but having grown up in the Netherlands — one of the largest fresh fruit and vegetable producers in Europe — the duo felt they would be able to apply their knowledge and skills to help farmers feed the world. They quit their jobs and founded Source.ag in early 2020 to hybridize tech and food.
For Kamman, Source.ag isn’t just a software vendor; he sees it as a long-term partner in a growing operation where the farmers are the heroes. If farming and tech might sound like strange bedfellows, Kamman is keen to point out how both growers and developers practice a craft and through this, they find common ground.
“I’ve found that craftsmen recognize, and easily connect with, other craftsmen — even outside their domain. It’s the love for the profession that is the connector, especially when combined with a humble curiosity in each other’s profession,” Kamman concludes. “It’s amazing to see our developers spend time in the greenhouse with the grower, learning from them firsthand what Source can build to help growers become even more successful.”
Source.ag raises $23M to raise the bar on raising crops with AI by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
Around 39,000 people were killed in motor vehicle incidents in the USA in 2020 — and 6,200 of those deaths were pedestrians. Needless to say, those deaths aren’t just statistics: each has a ripple effect on families, loved ones and the wider communities. Viva is looking to tackle transportation impacts after raising $8.5 million in funding to expand its transport data collection into North America, with the long-term hope to reduce the number of injuries and make traffic safer overall.
Viva (or VivaCity as it is known in the U.K.) is already well-established in Australia and the U.K. and is now bringing its artificial intelligence sensors to New York City. It will work with the New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DoT) on a new safety data analysis project. Viva’s sensors gather anonymized data showing how different street users move (or don’t) through the city. They can monitor how many vehicles or people are traveling in which direction, where and when congestion occurs and even detect “near misses” between vehicles or vehicles and pedestrians.
This wealth of anonymized data is intended to assist NYC DoT in making strategic decisions that help people move from A to B more efficiently, more sustainably and more safely. The theory is that if you can predict where accidents are likely to occur, taking action to prevent them beats waiting for one — or more — to happen before trying to do something about it.
“There is a critical need for technology that adapts to the changing mobility landscape. Reactive decision-making is not fit for purpose and it is costing lives. To change, we need to have data to better understand how people are using the roads,” Viva’s CEO Mark Nicholson explains. “This helps authorities to redirect their billions of annual infrastructure investment into the right places.”
“The main driver for both myself and my co-founders is to tackle climate change. It’s the sad truth that globally, transport is the most stubborn when it comes to emissions — even with electric vehicles coming in,” says Nicholson. In a nutshell, poor transport infrastructure is a people-killer in more ways than one. “Making our streets safer means more people can go places on foot or by two-wheeled pedal-power. Good for people, good for the planet.”
“I’m excited to see the impact this will have on road safety, particularly for vulnerable road users like cyclists. The perception that the roads are dangerous is the No. 1 reason that people don’t cycle more, so anything we can do to change that will have a huge climate impact,” says Nicholson.
Nicholson and his co-founders met at university in 2011, when they raised half a million dollars to build an experimental car that was 50x more efficient than standard road vehicles. Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, they founded Viva in 2015, looking to improve road safety and fight climate collapse.
Since its foundation, Viva has deployed more than 3,500 sensors in seven countries. These sensors can detect nine different modes of transport and have accumulated an impressive 20 billion road user counts. Its latest funding aims to help it grow further.
Viva’s latest funding is led by sustainable infrastructure VC investor EnBW New Ventures (ENV), sustainability-led alternative assets and SME investment manager Foresight Group and Gresham House Ventures, the growth equity arm of specialist alternative asset manager Gresham House. Using this fundraising, Viva says it is focused on continued growth, with two particular goals:
First is its internal expansion, of which the New York City collaboration is a part. “We’re already present in over 100 U.K. cities and have worked with authorities in Australia and around Europe to better understand their roads,” says Nicholson. “With our sensors installed in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, NYC DoT are now analyzing this data to prioritize projects for the areas most in need of safety and other improvements.”
The second goal is to expand the Viva product line. “Our vision is for road transport infrastructure to become data-driven, including real-time systems like traffic signals. The new product portfolio has targeted products that address the three major challenges the industry faces: road safety, sustainable transport and network optimization to beat congestion,” Nicholson concludes.
Nicholson is in no doubt of how valuable the data collected by Viva can be to creating livable cities. “If we look back 10-20 years, other industries have been revolutionized by data, including advertising, marketing and retail. These industries are now radically different because of data that has gone into their ecosystems.”
VivaCity’s sensors are privacy-forward and relatively unobtrusive. Image Credits: VivaCity
The collation of large-scale anonymized data will allow for the analysis of how a city’s roads function: how and when people move about, and where the bottlenecks and blackspots are. Ultimately, this can lead to safer streets and livable cities where citizens aren’t afraid to engage with active travel.
You might have noticed how there’s an emphasis on “anonymized data” here — the company tells TechCrunch that privacy-by-design is fundamental to the company, and it claims that maintaining the security and confidentiality of people’s data is critical to the company’s success.
“I believe strongly that the future of the Smart City has to be citizen-centric,” says Nicholson. “As such, we have designed our solutions from the ground up to guarantee the privacy of every citizen. The system was developed using data protection-by-design principles and is fully compliant with GDPR.”
VivaCity raises at $42M valuation to make US cities safer, starting with New York by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch
What is automation good for? Harvesting more broccoli than human laborers can, according to Upp, a Shropshire, U.K.-based agtech startup that’s using computer vision AI plus farm-sized proprietary machinery to expand crop yields.
Its pitch is not only that its specialist, AI-driven harvester will make it more efficient to pick a familiar crop but also that the process will reduce waste — by being able to extract more nutritious protein from a field of broccoli without needing an army of extra human workers to do it.
Upp says the smart machinery it’s developing will enable broccoli farmers to harvest more of the plant than they feasibly could using human field laborers because the AI-plus-tractor-tool combo will do it all: Fully automating the spotting, cutting, lifting and carrying, at a rate of up to 3km/h.
This AI-driven approach allows for farmers to “upcycle” the 80% of the broccoli plant (i.e extra stem and leaves) that’s normally left as waste on the field, per Upp, and sell that as a additional product that can be processed into a form it suggests is comparable to pea protein.
The startup’s concept system, which CEO and co-founder, David Whitewood, tells TechCrunch it’s been developing with help from technologists at the University of Lincoln, involves a tractor kitted out with a 3D camera and an on-board computer running a computer vision AI model that’s been trained to identify when broccoli heads are the right size for picking (with better-than-human accuracy, is the claim), along with a proprietary (patent pending) tractor-pulled cutting-and-harvesting tool.
“The job of harvesting broccoli is — firstly — you’ve got to recognize which heads are ready to be harvested. So we’ve been cooperating with the University of Lincoln’s agri products team who’ve been developing the machine learning and AI,” he explains. “We’ve been testing a whole bunch of cameras with them and dealing with the difficult problem of occlusion [where leaves may partly obscure the camera’s view of the broccoli head].
“They’ve using a depth-sensing camera with the 3D piece in it to determine the size of that head. Because we don’t cut every head — we only cut the ones at the right size as demanded by the supermarkets… That then says ‘cut’ and that sends a signal to our on-board computer and then we actuate our patented mechanism that grabs the plant — which would be the same as a human grasping the plant stem — and then a very sharp knife flies in and cuts it in a fraction of a second. And then the plant is lifted away.”
The extra edible plant matter harvested in this way isn’t intended for supermarket shelves — where the stringent cosmetics standards grocery retailers typically apply to their suppliers is a major contributor to food waste by refusing to stock less than perfect looking fruit and veg — rather the idea is for it to be processed into a protein- and nutrient-rich ingredient for selling to the food industry.
Upp envisages the dried broccoli protein being used in a range of products — from sports-style protein drinks to pre-prepared meals and baked goods.
The bits of the broccoli it’s targeting for upcycling are 30% protein by dried weight, per the startup’s website, and also packed with nutrients (vitamin A, B, C, E, K, calcium, iron, potassium, phosphorous, zinc) — as well as being high in fiber.
Upp does not appear to have had any trouble getting early interest from the food industry for the upcycled edible plant-protein — with Whitewood noting it already has a trio of industry partnerships inked (he can’t yet name names but says one is a global “functional drinks” giant; another is a big UK food brand; and the third is a specialist confectionary bakery).
“They’ve very interested in the health aspects of broccoli,” he goes on. “They’re interested in the fact that it’s clean and sustainable… So they’re excited, shall we say. I don’t think we’ve got a problem with a market for it — once we’ve got it off the field.”
On the processing piece, Upp is working with experts at the James Hutton Institute in Dundee to figure out how best “to recover the fractions from that plant that makes it suitable for the food industry primarily”, per Whitewood.
Zooming out, Upp is developing what it bills as a specialist “circular plant protein” business against a backdrop of growing demand for alternative, plant-based proteins as the food industry looks for ways to shrink its reliance on animal-derived proteins in order to reduce its carbon footprint — with global pressure on farmers and food companies to hit climate targets.
Hence the startup is projecting that its AI-harvested broccoli protein could grow into a multi billion-dollar market in the coming years.
On the marketing side it claims an added environmental upside — suggesting broccoli protein is cleaner than pea protein (being 4x less carbon intensive to produce), while also arguing it avoids the deforestation problem that’s tainted the reputation of soya crops. So the pitch is this is an even greener plant protein.
One potential PR wrinkle is there will inevitably be some (human) worker displacement as a result of automating the harvesting of broccoli.
Whitewood says the system replaces about seven field workers — but he notes that “warm bodies” are still needed in the pack house to package the broccoli products for retail. “Seven hard to get people,” he adds, sketching a picture of the gruelling work field laborers typically have to do and arguing these aren’t the kind of jobs anyone is going to miss. “Nobody wants to do this work. Even in China and India they’re struggling to get people to do this… It’s the 21st century and we’re still expecting people to do this. It’s just crazy.”
While the 2022-founded startup’s tech has been developed to the concept stage it’s gearing up for the next stage — to hone a robust technology that can be commercially deployed — with a series of “field-to-protein” pilots planned this year in the U.K., Spain and California.
It’s expecting to start commercial production (and generate its first revenues) in late 2024 — projecting revenues will exceed £50 million in its three pilot markets in 2027.
The business was established last year as a spinout from another U.K. agtech business called Earth Rover — where Whitewood had been CEO before moving over to Upp as a co-founder when they decided to separate into two distinct businesses.
Today the startup is announcing a £500,000 pre-seed investment from Elbow Beach Capital, a decarbonisation, sustainability and social impact investor, to fund the field trials — ahead of planned commercial deployment later next year.
Whitewood says the first commercial use of the tech will likely be in Spain or the UK, owing to seasonality, before Upp moves on to pitching California’s broccoli growers on automated crop yield optimization.
Why hasn’t anyone done thought about extracting more of the good stuff from broccoli plants before? Whitewood says people have been thinking about the potential to do this for over a decade but he suggest it’s just “really hard” — given the selective harvesting required, as well as the need to separate out the harvested crop, with part (the broccoli crown) going to supermarkets (to be sold fresh) and the rest requiring additional processing.
“It sounds simple — a lot of people have tried and a lot of people have failed,” he suggests. “It’s only since you’ve got a specialist harvester that can handle all the bulk that suddenly you can start to deal with the rest of it. You need automation — and it needs big automation. Little robots aren’t going to deal with crops of this scale, this bulk… You need farm-sized machinery.”
Upp wants to add more broccoli to the plant-protein mix using big automation by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Like nearly every other sector, deep tech faced significant headwinds in 2022. As interest rates skyrocketed, deep tech deals, which inherently take more capital than other kinds of software businesses, became less attractive to many VCs and their LPs than lower-risk investments.
For instance, even though quantum computing suddenly became popular in the public markets as D-Wave, Rigetti and IonQ listed in the last year, private investment declined significantly — the sector received just over $600 million in venture capital in 2022, down from $800 million in 2021, according to Crunchbase.
Seasoned investors and operators in different segments of deep tech have been adapting to these changes in real time as the cheap money days dwindle in the rearview. For instance, in this environment, space tech startups would never have been able to raise the kind of money they did in 2021 to be able to deploy the technologies they’re working on today. As Delian Asparouhov, a principal at Founders Fund and the founder of Varda Space Industries, shared last month, it would be impossible to raise the $42 million his startup did in 2021 for its space factory “idea” in today’s market climate.
While some investors will continue to sit on the sidelines as we kick off 2023, it’s important to note that many funds are still sitting on amounts of dry powder like they’ve never had before. That doesn’t mean they or their LPs will be in a rush to deploy that capital, but money will be available to startups that can demonstrate current demand and are realistic about their valuations. As it becomes increasingly difficult to realize big exits in the years ahead, the technologies within deep tech that are transforming entire industries offer some of the only paths to “10x exits.”
These are positive signs for deep tech founders preparing to raise money this year. Another positive note is that some of the logic driving VCs to stay away from deep tech startups in down markets may be unfounded. Our team recently analyzed recent deep tech unicorns to understand how much money it took for them to get to the $1 billion mark. The results reinforced what we knew from experience: Deep tech startups’ capital and time requirements are on par with companies in other sectors. In fact, the median deep tech startup took $115 million and 5.2 years to become a unicorn.
While the space economy will continue to provide numerous opportunities to invest in atoms, there will also be an opportunity to invest in the bits moving atoms across our skies.
With that as a backdrop, let’s look at a few areas where deep tech will find interest from investors in 2023.
While Delian noted correctly that funding for long-term “moon shots” will be tough to find in the current market, I still believe investors will look for startups that are closer to commercialization in the sector. To date, 99% of the total investment in the space tech market has gone to the satellite and launch industries. Now is the time to focus on moving objects around in space rather than just getting them there.
For instance, investors are increasingly interested in solutions that tackle astrodynamics or propulsion to guide the motion of satellites and other spacecraft — for example, AI startups working on ways to simulate scenarios and generate maneuver plans for operators so they can avoid space collisions. Investors are also interested in future machine learning and neural networks use cases for astrodynamics, such as orbit predictions and spacecraft flight modeling.
Space missions also call for hardened software and hardware. As we look toward edge solutions for space-bound vehicles and objects, startups that can create radiation-safe applications will be in demand. So while the space economy will continue to provide numerous opportunities to invest in atoms, there will also be an opportunity to invest in the bits moving atoms across our skies.
Software alone will never solve the multitude of issues contributing to our climate crisis. Hardware solutions and engineering-led innovations in deep tech are needed to solve our most significant climate challenges.
A VC’s perspective on deep tech fundraising in Q1 2023 by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch
A group of scientists just created a mobile cybernetic entity using robotics and the manipulated muscle mass of a dead animal. Neat! Here's the abstract from the paper, titled "Remote control of muscle-driven miniature robots with battery-free wireless optoelectronics," which was recently published in the journal Science Robotics:
— Read the restBioengineering approaches that combine living cellular components with three-dimensional scaffolds to generate motion can be used to develop a new generation of miniature robots.
Tinker the Robot was created by David Weston in 1966. Weston, an inventor, could control the Robot's actions from a control panel in his garage. The robot had a 200 meter range of motion and contained over 120 electric motors as well as other features. — Read the rest
Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid robot has a bunch of new skills, such as the ability to pick up and arrange wood planks, toss heavy objects, jump around on a scaffolding, and land a perfect backflip. I, for one, will run like hell from our new robotic overlords. — Read the rest
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