When you buy your fruits and vegetables, you expect to receive quality produce. But for that to happen, quality control must be done on said produce. Since there are vast amounts of produce in need of review, doing that quality control can take forever. for a huge amount of this produce around the world, which can take forever. Moreover, if you think about it, the parties involved in the process all have their own standards of quality which often complicates the process and even leads to cancellation. Luckily, an Israeli startup has developed a system that can do these tests relatively quickly and easily.

Preventing cancelled fruit and vegetable sales

The Israeli startup Clarifruit has developed a platform that uses iPhone and Android apps and enables the collection of information for quality control of fruits and vegetables; it provides a real-time indication of the identification of the fruits, and the uploading of the information to the cloud. The images of the produce are processed in the cloud by computer vision algorithms, which analyze them based on external features such as size, colour, and more. The information collected allows the algorithm to learn after each test and improve for future identifications.

According to the company, its application for iPhones gives its customers – including farmers, marketing chains, and importers – improved capabilities, by using the built-in LiDAR sensors to perform a more extensive and accurate diagnosis of the produce’s characteristics.

"Every transaction between a buyer and supplier is based on quality, but in the world today there is no uniform standard for the quality of fresh produce, and therefore most of the largest organizations in the world have created their own standard, which has resulted in a situation where at least two quality control checks are performed before each transaction. The transaction will only go through if there is an agreement between the two parties on the result of the tests. Because of the complex nature of the tests, 25% of the transactions are cancelled, or carried out under special conditions– a situation that creates a loss for both parties," said Avi Schwartzer, one of the company's founders and COO, in a conversation with Geektime.

He says that the company's customers report that they were able to cut the time of their quality control tests in half with the help of the platform, along with using the reports that the platform produces for them, which helps them improve the delivery time of the fruits and vegetables.

Raising capital

Clarifruit was founded in 2017 by Avi Schwartzer (COO), Elad Mardix (CEO) and Ruby Boyarski (CTO). Today (Wednesday) the company reports raising a Series A round of $12 million. The round was led by Firstime and Champel Capital, with participation from Kubota, a manufacturer of mechanized equipment and agricultural technologies from Japan; the venture capital fund NevaTeam Partners; private investors who participated in the Seed round. The company currently employs 25 people, 21 of them in Israel.