Bluerivert

Blue River Technology develops computer-vision, machine-learning and robotics systems for agriculture, designed to measure and treat individual plants rather than apply chemicals uniformly across a field. Its machines capture images of plants in real time, identify crops and weeds, decide what action each plant requires, and apply inputs precisely, while capturing plant-by-plant data. The company states this approach can reduce herbicide use by up to 90 percent while improving yields and lowering farmer costs.

The company's first smart machine, the lettuce bot, automated lettuce thinning by imaging seedlings, identifying which to remove, spraying them and verifying accuracy in real time. Its successor, See & Spray, uses deep learning to recognize a wider variety of crops and weeds with greater accuracy and to make crop-management decisions in the field; custom nozzle designs provide sub-one-inch spray resolution. See & Spray has been deployed for weeding in cotton and soybeans, extending the company beyond its original specialty-vegetable market.

Blue River Technology has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Deere & Company since 2017 and works with Deere to advance plant-by-plant application solutions across the John Deere product ecosystem.

Founding story

The company traces to 2011, when two Stanford graduate students, Jorge Heraud, formerly head of precision agriculture at Trimble Navigation, and Lee, a PhD student and roboticist, met in Steve Blank's Lean LaunchPad course. They set out to make farming more sustainable through robotics and computer vision, building and testing their concept in California's Central Valley to prove that machine learning, computer vision and robotics could be applied to agriculture. Blue River Technology was formed with support from friends and family and a grant from the National Science Foundation. Heraud had spent 15 years at Trimble Navigation, leading the Precision Agriculture group, serving as Director of Engineering for the Agriculture group and heading M&A.

Business model

Blue River builds and sells intelligent agricultural machinery and the software that runs it, targeting inputs plant-by-plant rather than across whole fields. An early commercial approach described by an investor was to sell technology to farmers in the form of services they were already accustomed to purchasing, rather than as an outright equipment purchase. Since the 2017 Deere acquisition the technology has been advanced within, and distributed through, the John Deere organization.

Revenue derives from intelligent agricultural machinery and related crop-management services and software; one data provider places the company in a $10-50M revenue range, while another cites a $250M-500M range.

Traction

By December 2015 Blue River robots were providing plant-by-plant care on approximately 10 percent of U.S. lettuce fields. The company raised $10 million in Series A-1 (2014) and $17 million in Series B (2015) and was acquired by Deere & Company for $305 million in 2017. Reported headcount figures range from 133 to the 201-500 band, with revenue estimates from $10-50M to $250M-500M depending on the data provider.

Latest developments

See & Spray, the successor to the lettuce bot, uses deep learning to identify a wider variety of crops and weeds and is operating in weeding for cotton and soybeans. In 2023 the company purchased an 83,590-square-foot office building from Toeniskoetter Development.