Global Courant
Founders of Aigen: Rich Wurden (CTO) and Kenny Lee (CEO)
Courtesy: Aigen
The Aigen Element looks like a drawing board on robust tires. It drives itself continuously at about two miles per hour across farmland, using a sophisticated computer vision system to identify crops and unwanted botanical intruders.
Bi-axis robotic arms placed close to the ground allow the Element to clear out weeds where they dry out before it can grow seeds and spread.
Operated in a fleet and sized to meet the needs of a particular crop, the robots run continuously for 12 to 14 hours at a time and never need to be plugged in. They are equipped with a lithium iron phosphate battery, as well as flexible solar panels that are lighter than the type typically used on roofs. They can even run for about four hours in the dark, or six hours in light to moderate rain, all without the emissions associated with diesel-powered farm equipment.
The company behind the robots, Aigen, was founded by Rich Wurden, an ex-Tesla engineer, along with former Proofpoint director Kenny Lee in 2020.
According to the most recent data available from the US Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. pesticide use exceeded 1.1 billion pounds annually in 2012, nearly 60% of which was through herbicides. Glyphosate was the most widely used active ingredient that year, at 270 million to 290 million pounds, and had been since 2001.
Reducing growers’ over-reliance on pesticides and the heavy use of chemicals in the global food supply is of personal interest to Wurden and Lee. Both founders and several employees in their 15-person team have experienced significant health problems associated with pesticide exposure.
The Aigen Element uses computer vision to spot and remove weeds without pesticides.
Courtesy: Aigen
Wurden, Aigen’s CTO, comes from a family of sugar beet farmers in Minnesota. Now, he says, his family’s farm grows sorghum and soy.
“My pancreas suddenly stopped producing insulin when I was 15,” he said. He always suspected pesticide exposure, which is associated with a higher risk of diabetes, was a factor.
A type 1 diabetic, he has lived with an insulin pump every day since his diagnosis and is mindful of the health of the environment.
Before becoming an entrepreneur, Wurden worked as a mechanical engineer and on battery technology at Tesla, where he helped create the battery pack found in the best-selling Model 3 and Y vehicles and Model S sedan. He later joined an electric boating startup called Pure Watercraft in Seattle, where he says he caught some of the startup bug.
Lee, who is the CEO of Aigen, overcame non-Hodgkin lymphoma as a young man and says he is interested in both personal and planetary health after a career in cybersecurity where he was more focused on making the internet a safer place for everyone. (Lee co-founded Weblife.io, which was acquired by Proofpoint in 2017 in a deal worth about $60 million.)
Wurden and Lee met on a Slack channel called Work on Climate, where technology industry veterans discussed how to change or grow their careers while fighting the climate crisis.
Collect data to analyze pests and water
Farmers want to be able to determine exactly when and where insects appear, so that they can, for example, eliminate the insects that pose a risk. They also want irrigation-related analytics, which tell them if their plants are getting enough water and if some areas of the field might need more irrigation than others.
Typically, a fleet of Element robots would drive continuously across the field, collecting data each time. Currently, the system can provide what farmers call a “stock count,” analyzing how many healthy plants are in the field.
The Aigen Element runs on solar and wind energy, completely off the grid. It also runs its analytics and AI machine learning software on the device, rather than in the cloud. Therefore, Lee said, the company has the potential to give farmers more comprehensive crop analytics.
“While we weed we can do other things that no other agtech can because we are mobile on the ground.”
Aigen’s farm robots run on solar and wind energy, with a lithium iron phosphate battery.
Courtesy: Aigen
The Element could also help farmers get around a persistent agricultural labor shortage, keeping their crops healthy even during extreme heat that would make it hostile for humans to continue weeding out in the fields.
According to Trent Eidem, who has signed up to put the Aigen Element to work at his sugar beet farm near Fargo, the robots are also appealing because they can reduce the amount of money growers have to spend on precious “inputs,” namely herbicides. . . Inputs and energy are his biggest budget items, Eidem said.
In the coming year, the company plans to build and bring more of their robots to farmers – as well as developing additional capabilities for them.
Aigen has raised approximately $7 million in early stage funding and additional grant money from the State of Idaho to develop their system.
Investors include a mix of technology and climate-focused seed and venture capital funds: NEA, Global Founders, Regen Ventures, Bessemer, Climate Tech VC, Cleveland Ave., and a climate fund founded by ex-meta director Mike Schroepfer.
NEA partner Andrew Schoen, who invests in emerging technology, told CNBC that the Aigen founders’ track record in both software and hardware and ability to build an “autonomous ground robot” before raising any funding makes him trust him. gave to invest. He also said Aigen addresses a huge pain point for farmers, representing a potentially huge market.
According to forecasts from Fortune Business Insights, the global market for pesticides, or “plant protection products”, is expected to exceed $80 billion by 2028. The investor increasingly believes that agricultural producers will include robotics, not just chemical inputs, in their mix.
