The lack of working hands in the various fields of agriculture is a global problem and the solution to this comes from Israel
The Bluewhite company (formerly Blue White Robotics) develops a Robots-as-a-Service product, which is embedded in the work tools that are already in the farmers, making them smart and autonomous. For example, Blue-White’s system can be used to make any regular tractor autonomous, and allow it to go out for spraying, pruning or fertilizing work autonomously in the field. The system allows control and control of a large number of tools at the same time, with all information accessible to the farmer in one dashboard.
The Israeli company’s product also includes the hardware, which enables remote control of the tractor and its autonomous operation; And also the software, which enables the management of the fleet of agricultural vehicles and the presentation of the various information. Ben Alfi, CEO and one of the founders of BW, explains in a conversation with Gigtime that the company’s autonomous system is developed in-house: “We use AI to process and fuse information from a variety of sensors – cameras, lidars, GPS and various sensors, which enable autonomous driving. We built dedicated AI models in the company to deal with difficult environmental conditions, obstacles, driving without GPS and more.”
The autonomous system knows how to work in orchards and wineries, when during the onboarding process of the customer it performs a short mapping process in the block of the farm where the tools equipped with our technology will operate, and they are ready to start working. Then in BW, the tasks of the tractor are entered into the software component, Compass, which controls the tractor remotely and the tractor is ready to go to work autonomously. During work, the autonomous system sees and analyzes the tractor’s environment in real time and adjusts the operation in the field.
According to Alfi, the company’s product is the only one that currently operates commercially in the field of autonomous tractors, with the company’s system having already accumulated more than 50,000 hours of work on farms of paying customers throughout the US. Alfi notes that the company employs veterans of the military system who come with decades of Background in the development of autonomous tools: “As with any autonomous product in transportation, construction, etc., there are many challenges in the transition to commercialization and therefore the number of mature companies in the field is still limited,” Alfi tells us.
The developer:
Blue-White was founded in 2017 by Alfie together with Yair Shahar and Aviram Shmueli, and its headquarters are in Tel Aviv with additional offices in Fresno, California. The company employs a total of 130 people, with 85 of them in Israel. The company has completed a C fundraising round in the amount of 39 million dollars. The fundraising round was led by the Insight Partners fund, and several new investors also participated, including Alumni Ventures and LIP Ventures. Alongside these, the existing investors in the company also participated in the round: Entrée Capital, Jesselson, and Peregrine Ventures.
