Vineyard management software technology company Agriculture Scout AI Inc. has raised $3 million to expand its technology that uses photo images and artificial intelligence to help wine grape growers achieve more productive yields.
The equity investment was led by Palo Alto-based Vertical Venture Partners, said Mason Earles, company co-founder and chief technology officer.
“We get useful information out of the photos,” Earles said. “In an ideal world, we would look at every plant on a vine-by-vine basis.”
In the real world, however, that is too time consuming to be accomplished over vast acreages by a farmer or worker.
But farmers can mount a camera like a GoPro or phone on a tractor and then go about their regular work, and then those hundreds of thousands of images can be analyzed by Agriculture Scout software.
Agriculture Scout AI technology analyzes 20 images of every vine and uses artificial intelligence to inventory, rate and grade individual vines captured in the many photos.
The $3 million equity capital raise was reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The company’s software can also compare images over time to better estimate yields and also to see what parts of a vineyard need help or are not productive at all, Earles said.
People don’t realize that what appears to be a healthy vineyard might have 10% that is just not productive, Earles said. Using images, growers can address those areas in time to have an effect, he said.
Earles is also a professor at the University of California Davis, which was the genesis of some of the technology for the company.
Agricultural Scout does business as Scout. Its headquarters office is in Davis and its operations office is in Napa County, where the other co-founder, CEO Kia Behnia, owns a vineyard.
Benhia is a Bay Area technology industry veteran who has held executive positions at companies including Splunk and BMC Software. He owns the sustainable Neotempo Wines in Napa, which he bought in 2011 and which had its inaugural wine release in 2021.
Benhia was doing research for his wine-growing efforts and took a precision viticulture class from Earles at UC Davis. Earles teaches in the department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering.
The two incorporated Scout in 2022, and they have a licensing agreement with UC Davis. Benhia declined to say how many employees the company has.
The company is focused on wine and grapes now, which are the highest value specialty crop in the state, Earles said. But Scout software could have applications for other crops.
Earles earned his doctorate at UC Davis in 2015. He went on to be a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University for two years before starting work at Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) in 2018 as a data science engineer. He has been an assistant professor at UC Davis since 2019.
