Pittsburgh-based agriculture-tech startup Bloomfield Robotics Inc. has won the inaugural Future of Life Online Challenge from Boston-based and global cloud services provider Akamai Technologies Inc.
In addition to being the competition's first-ever winner, the fruits of the award also came with products and services from Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) valued at $1 million.
"It's every startup's dream to have a big company say, here's $1,000,000, do with it what you will. That's the first time that's ever happened to me," Bloomfield Robotics CEO Mark DeSantis said. "This is elemental. It's a fundamental building block of our infrastructure that they're helping us with and will directly impact our bottom line. It's a gift, and it's an important gift."
With AI and custom imaging tech from Bloomfield Robotics, farmers are able to monitor and track individual crops throughout a plant's lifespan; be it a season, or in the case of perennials and trees, for years and even decades. This monitoring allows for farmers to have a digital twin of their crops that Bloomfield claims is a level of inspection that's never been done before at such a scale.
According to DeSantis, the future of farming involves this "digitalization" of plants. He said he knows "that sounds crazy," but it's also a future that's not all that different today; where farmers inspect and document the crops their fields produce, a process that's existed since the onset of agriculture.
But unlike today's manual-focused approach where farmers might inspect several dozen plants in a given field of hundreds or thousands, Bloomfield is betting on a future where its cameras and other propriety tech do all of this work autonomously and even down to a plant or tree's individual fruit throughout its lifespan and across acres upon acres of farmland.
"That's a whole lot of data, that's a massive amount of data; that's an amount of data that makes the mapping of the streets of the world seem like child's play, and that's where farming is going," DeSantis said. "We want to keep all that, but you don't want to keep so much of it that it starts to eat away at your business model and sort of starts chewing up all your cash."
As for the significance of the award, DeSantis said Akamai's products will allow the startup to store and move this data more efficiently in the cloud, allowing farmers or cultivators to more seamlessly interact with and find data that Bloomfield is capturing to then use it in a way that's beneficial to them. Perhaps a certain vine located in one region of a vineyard is producing more succulent grapes or an apple tree is growing a bit taller than the one next to it. Using this data could result in better margins for a farm, DeSantis said, among other benefits.
"Every plant is different, and what that means for you and me and feeding the world, which is the most important thing, ultimately, it means that you can increase yields by recognizing the difference in the performance of plants without necessarily increasing water consumption, fertilizer or pesticides," DeSantis said. "In fact, it's making it more sustainable, increasing yields, but doing it with data rather than expensive resources like water and fertilizer."
Kim Salem-Jackson, chief marketing officer at Akamai and one of the challenge's judges, said Bloomfield won the competition due to Akamai's shared values of Bloomfield; "making life better for billions of people billions of times a day."
"Bloomfield is at the bleeding edge of crop digitization, an exciting convergence of big data and artificial intelligence," Salem-Jackson said in a press release. "Bloomfield represents the best of the entrepreneurial spirit and Akamai couldn’t be more excited to help the company grow and fuel positive change in helping deliver better food to consumer tables around the world."
Bloomfield employs 16 full-time workers out of its South Side headquarters. It has operations in four countries — the U.S., France, Italy and Peru — and is planning to expand to more countries in Europe and Latin America soon.
