Agritech robotics startup TartanSense on Wednesday said it has raised USD 5 million (around Rs 37 crore) from investors for business expansion and growth.
The company said in a statement that the Series A funding round was led by FMC Ventures and Omnivore, with participation from existing investor Blume Ventures.
This brings the total funds raised by the company to USD 7 million. It had raised USD 2 million in a Seed funding round in March 2019.
It builds small agricultural robots, equipped with AI-assisted computer vision, to help small farms reduce their expenditures and improve their incomes.
Its robots are an affordable precision agriculture solution for all major farming activities – sowing, spraying, weeding, and harvesting.
BladeRunner, TartanSense’s latest robot, can identify, precisely locate, and mechanically uproot undesirable weeds as well as spot spray on the desired crop – reducing chemical usage by 45 per cent as well as increasing weeding efficiency by 7 times, the statement said.
Based in Bengaluru, TartanSense was originally founded in 2015 by Jaisimha Rao, an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University who returned to India after working as a quant on Wall Street.
Jaisimha Rao, Founder, TartanSense, said, “Our mission is to make smallholder farmers wealthier by shipping monetizable robots. TartanSense will have the world’s largest fleet of agriculture robots in the next 18 months.”