Inspired by his grandparents, a Chinese apple farmer, Charlie Wu gained the idea of applying technology to agriculture while studying computer science at Cornell University, the top agricultural school.
“What they do has helped me meet the best fruit professors in the world,” Wu told TechCrunch. “Talking to them, I realized that even the largest farm in the country didn’t really know what’s actually growing in their field.”
He dropped out of Cornell, became a Thiel Fellow and began construction of Orchard Robotics in 2022. It is a startup that uses cameras and AI to help fruit growers manage their crops more accurately.
On Wednesday, Orchard Robotics announced its $22 million Series A funding led by quiet Capital and Shine Capital, bringing participation from returning investors, including General Catalyst and Corntary.
While the idea of using computer vision for specialist crops is nothing new, WU says that the largest farms in the United States still rely on manual sampling to make important decisions about farm operations.
There is an estimate that the number of healthy fruits in vineyards and orchards can be very inaccurate, as farmers only inspect only a small fraction of their crops.
“If you don’t know what you’re growing in the field, you don’t know how many chemicals you’re going to apply to it. You don’t know how many workers you’ll hire to harvest it. You don’t know what you can actually sell and sell the market,” Wu said.
TechCrunch Events
San Francisco
|
October 27th-29th, 2025
Small cameras in the orchard are mounted on tractors and farm vehicles to collect ultra-high resolution images of fruit health as operators drive the field. These images are analyzed by AI for fruit size, color and health.
The data is then uploaded to Orchard’s cloud-based software. This serves as a central record for making decisions on vines and trees that may require additional fertilization, pruning, or thinning.
Orchard is already used in some of the country’s largest apple and grape farms, and the startup has recently begun offering its technology to blueberries, cherry, almonds, pistachios, citrus and strawberry growers.
The company is not just using cameras mounted on tractors to utilize AI for image analysis of special crops. Orchard’s direct competitors include Bloomfield Robotics, which was acquired by agricultural equipment maker Kubota last year, seed stage startup Vivid Robotics and Green Atlas.
Wu acknowledges that the existing market for fruit and vegetable data is only $1.5 billion, but believes that future advances in AI will allow technology to make autonomous decisions and expand Orchard’s offerings.
He hopes that Orchard’s evolution reflects the evolution of herd safety. It is currently a $7.5 billion public safety startup that has collected license plate information over the past eight years, expanding it to other products such as gunshot wounds and video surveillance.
“Our ambition is not just to collect data, but to do much more,” Wu said. “We want to collect data, build an operating system on top of it, and ultimately own all the workflows within the farm, which could potentially expand the market considerably.”
