Prospera wants to use AI to bring agriculture into the 21st century

Agriculture is about to get a healthy injection of AI. Thanks to machine learning company Prospera, one of man’s oldest practices will be made new by way of Propsera’s AI based solutions. By applying techniques in deep learning, computer vision, and data science, the Tel Aviv-based firm hopes to transform farming “from an intuition-based practice to an optimized data-based practice.”

Prospera uses in-field cameras and climatic sensors to create what the company claims is “uniquely accurate remote agronomy and management solutions” for farmers across the globe. Essentially, farmers will be granted real-time insights to their crops, eliminating the need to scour acres and acres of land for days on end. Rather, Prospera promises to help farmers analyze crops “from a leaf by leaf basis to a multi-field multi crop basis,” which ought to help address issues like pests, disease, irrigation, nutrient deficiencies, and other potential problems.

“The agriculture industry is a great candidate for applying pragmatic AI. 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 co-founder of Prospera. “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.”

Claiming to offer a cost-effective and scalable solution for the ever-important agricultural industry, Prospera says that its use of AI can actually help farmers do their jobs (which is to say, feed the world), in a more efficient and sustainable way. Already, Prospera’s technology can be found in greenhouse farms throughout Europe, North America, and Israel, and is also powering some of the facilities that supply big name grocers like Walmart, Tesco, Sainsburys, 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 of Bessemer Venture Partners, one of Prospera’s investors. “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.”