Prospera raises $7 million for A.I.-based farming

Prospera has raised $7 million for smart agriculture tools for farmers. The funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners will be used to bring Prospera’s artificial intelligence-based solutions to more farmers worldwide.

Tel Aviv, Israel-based Prospera is a precision agriculture company that uses computer vision, deep learning, and agtech to figure out exactly how much water to deliver to plants in particular locations so as to improve crop yields while conserving resources.

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Prospera taps data science to turn farming from an intuition-based practice to an optmized data science.

With in-field cameras and climatic sensors, Prospera said it offers accurate remote agronomy and management solutions to farmers around the world. These solutions empower farmers with real-time analysis of what is happening to their crops on a leaf-by-leaf basis or a multi-field, multi-crop basis. This allows farmers to tackle critical issues plaguing underperforming fields, including pests, disease, irrigation problems, nutrient deficiencies, and suboptimal agro-technical activities.

“The agriculture industry is a great candidate for applying pragmatic A.I. Prospera is aiming to lead the way to making agriculture intelligent and efficient with technology by solving the key pain points of growers globally,” said Daniel Koppel, CEO and cofounder of Prospera, in a statement. “Recent breakthroughs in neural networks, combined with the commoditization of cloud computing and sensors, have made it possible for us to develop field-analytics solutions that predict and improve performance in a new and revolutionary way.”

Already operational in medium to large greenhouse farms across Europe, North America, and Israel, Prospera’s technology is being used by farms that supply some of the largest grocery retailers in Europe and the U.S., including Walmart, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Aldi.

“Prospera is generating unique and proprietary data on crops at a level of granularity which never before existed in the agriculture world. Combining this unique data with some of the best experts in computer vision, and machine learning has the potential to revolutionize the way we grow food” said Adam Fisher, at Bessemer Venture Partners, in a statement. “As investments in AgTech are anticipated to continue rising this year, we are pleased to be working with this unique company that is optimizing crop yields based on proximal imaging and deep learning technology.”

Founded in 2014 by computer scientists, Prospera is an agtech data and analytics firm that enables farmers to optimize crop yields and grow their businesses.

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