Israeli drone startup SeeTree, which develops AI-powered tree intelligence for growers, announced a $30 million Series B funding round. The investment was led by the International Finance Corporation, with participation from orange juice leader Citrosuco, Orbia Ventures, drip irrigation innovator Netafim, and Hanaco Ventures - which led the Series A round.

Tree care 4.0

SeeTree’s AI-powered system identifies the health and growth rates of every tree in a farmer’s grove and enables the creation of personalized cultivation plans for each tree or cluster of trees. SeeTree fits multi-spectral sensors on drone fleets that collect ultra-high-rez images that provide, in addition to tree and soil samples, in-depth data analysis through proprietary Machine-Learning algorithms. The company notes that the farmers are provided with real-time actionable and informative insight into their trees’ health and needs, such as pest and disease tracking, water consumption, and more.

"We started with citrus and are servicing the largest citrus growers globally. We have a strong playbook and will continue scaling within citrus. We are now equally focused on growing our offerings into new crops such as almonds, olives, and hazelnuts, where we are already deployed and supporting farmers" explains CEO Israel Talpaz.

With operations in Brazil, the United States, Chile, and South Africa and a team of 120 professionals, SeeTree monitors over fifty million trees around the world, which will grow to 1 billion trees by 2023. “Our vision is to enable the ‘Tree-Farming 4.0 Revolution’ with the Intelligence-per-Tree that we provide. SeeTree as a standalone solution can reduce operational expenses by 20-40%. By connecting SeeTree to tractors, irrigation systems we can unlock additional optimizations to further increase the value to our farmers,” adds Talpaz.

SeeTree was founded in 2017 by Barak Hachamov, CEO Israel Talpaz, and CTO Guy Morgenstern. The Agtech company has raised $45 million to date, and plans on investing the new funds into scaling globally, growing the R&D and customer-facing teams, and broadening service offering to cover new crops.

“SeeTree has scaled in a massive, but frankly difficult-to-penetrate, market,” describes Pasha Romanovski, cofounder and Partner at Hanaco Ventures and Board Director at SeeTree. “The SeeTree team, led by Israel, has been able to productize a tremendous amount of deep technology into a platform accessible to farmers. They’ve developed great technology and have been able to execute in an important market ripe for innovation – trees.”