In March 2022, Koidra raised US$4.5 million in a seed round led by Ospraie Ag Science (OAS) with participation from Amritam Holdings, Cavallo Ventures, and Foothill Ventures.
Intelligent automation combines multiple disciplines including artificial intelligence, mathematics and physics to transform real-time data into useful decisions. Koidra delivers decision intelligence to their clients to optimize the operational decision making process and advance manufacturing businesses on their journey to achieving hyper-automation.
Why It Matters
Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) is a growing sector over concerns of rising demands for food and water, locally and sustainably sourced products, resilient supply chains and negative impacts of climate change on outdoor agriculture.
Meanwhile, it faces a shortage of skilled growers, challenges of massively complex control systems, operational inefficiencies due to manual processes, and a lack of data-driven decision making.
Our thesis was to invest in a state-of-the-art AI and automation tech stack serving indoor growers that reduces operating risk and production volatility while enabling growth in the overall CEA market.
We scoured the CEA landscape and found Koidra to be the most compelling opportunity that aligns with this thesis. They have a full-stack data-driven AI platform that helps companies upstream (connecting data from multiple data silos), midstream (visualizing and monitoring the data and creating new insights), and downstream (turning data into actions for higher productivity, and autonomously). This translates to significantly improved yield, higher profitability, and reduced environmental impact.
Koidra’s technology is based on a new paradigm of combining physics and reinforcement learning and their team is top-notch, led by Kenneth Tran, a former AI researcher at Microsoft. Koidra’s public track record in the autonomous greenhouse challenge further validates their approach, consistently outperforming higher funded technology companies and expert growers in simulation and real-world applications. Additionally, feedback from Koidra’s existing and prospective customers during our due diligence process was superb which includes some of the largest greenhouse growers in North America. We are thrilled to partner with Koidra and are excited to watch them transform the CEA and industrial automation sectors.
- Brett Morris, Managing Director at Cavallo Ventures
