Agriculture Startups funded by Y Combinator (YC) 2024

Iron Ox is redesigning agriculture to confront its staggering environmental impacts and adapting farming to meet our future needs by making it a precise science that lets plants reach their full potential.

Bear Flag Robotics is developing autonomous driving technology for farm tractors. By equipping tractors and implements with technology, Bear Flag allows growers to automate and optimize many of their most common tasks. This addresses the farm labor shortage while removing workers from hazardous conditions. Additionally, Bear Flag provides growers with analytics that help them garner actionable insights about their crops and operations.

Thrive Agritech designs and manufactures advanced lighting fixtures for indoor agriculture. We have a patent pending LED lighting system that precisely targets various photosynthetic spectrums. Many thousands of our LED lighting fixtures have been installed in some of the world's leading indoor farms. Our products are saving millions of watt-hours of energy every day in vertical farms, greenhouses and cannabis production facilities. Agritech expands beyond lighting and so do we. Our R&D team is actively involved in creating advanced sensor and communications networks to work with both human and artificial intelligence to create the optimized farm of the future.

1.2B lbs of fish are caught everyday yet as little as 1 in 3 fish make it to a plate — most of this waste arises because fish are suffocated on boats or electrocuted on farms. Suffocation and inaccurate electrocution create stress and so acidify meat, damage quality and significantly reduce shelf-life. Artisanal techniques in high-end sushi multiply shelf-life and taste but, because of the variation in fish, are difficult to perform in a mechanical fashion. Shinkei automates traditional techniques using robotics to provide long-lasting and delicious fish for farmers and harvesters at scale.

We’re on a mission to optimize the agricultural industry. When we started Bountiful in 2015, the grape error rate for predicting production was 30 percent. Why? We found that many farmers in the specialty crops space were still using traditional pencil-and-paper techniques to predict yield. These low-fidelity forecasting methods weren’t giving them a clear enough understanding of their production until it was too late, leading to waste and inefficiency throughout the supply chain. We saw a problem we wanted to solve. Today, Bountiful is using advanced data science to help farmers forecast more accurately, so they can make better decisions. In the last three years, we’ve combined the latest in machine learning with weather, satellite, geographic, and historical data. The result is a user-friendly platform that transforms volumes of complex agricultural information into simple, actionable insights farmers can use to run more economically and environmentally sustainable farms. More recently, we’re working to open the dialogue between buyers and sellers, remove uncertainty, and provide clarity to the supply chain to meet global food demand. Our ultimate goal is to close the agricultural margin of error. Not only will this make individual farms more efficient, profitable, and sustainable, but it will help optimize the global food supply chain. That means healthier people and a healthier planet.

Four Growers was founded to provide healthy, affordable, local produce by reducing the production costs of greenhouse growers through robotics technology. We are positioning ourselves to be the automated solutions provider for greenhouse crop management. We are working closely with various greenhouse growers to develop a tomato harvesting robot. Our technology relies on two layers of protection, patents filed protecting the physical design of the robot and a proprietary algorithm that controls the robot's decision making. Our solution is not only capable of harvesting the tomatoes, but also of performing a quality check and packaging.

Pests and pathogens cost the world hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Existing technologies like agrochemicals are no longer working. Ohmic Biosciences uses protein engineering to design resistance genes for crops that are robust to pathogen evolution.

PickTrace is a fast growing software company that provides workforce and harvest management solutions for large-scale farms. Founded by brothers Austin and Harrison Steed, PickTrace is building the farm management system of the future. PickTrace builds powerful software products that help agriculture companies thrive. Our workforce and harvest management software helps growers gain insight into their operations and improve their operational efficiency. Everything that we do is based on the conviction that we succeed when our customers build a more efficient, compliant, and profitable operation.

Ovipost builds automated insect farms. Insects are the most efficient way to convert abundant, cheap byproducts into nutritionally dense protein. Today live insects are a $175m industry in the US, but the future of the industry is leveraging their excellent amino acid profiles and superior digestibility to replace fishmeal ($9.5B industry) and other expensive proteins in animal feeds. Led by co-founders Trina Chiasson (sold Infoactive to Tableau) and Teq Sassmannshaus (biotech hardware engineer), the Ovipost team has deep experience in hardware, software, and biology. 

We have created a market place that enables the sales of agro-commodities locally and internationally while providing rural farmers with all the resources they will need to grow crops like loans to but inputs and the needed extension services for better insights.

Instacrops is a simple dashboard that helps farmers maximize their crop yield. We give farmers IoT sensors to put in their field. We combine that data with satellite and drone data to provide analytics on the health of their farms. Farmers use this to increase their crops yield by 12% on average. We’re live on 300+ farms across Latam and have reached more than $200.000 in monthly revenue, growing 2X YoY. There’s 2.9 billion acres of farmland in Latin America which makes this a $50 billion market. We’re instacrops. We’re bringing data driven decisions to farmers worldwide

The Insect Farming Company. We’re developing the world’s most efficient and sustainable way to produce protein. Insects are rich in protein and are a natural component of the diets of many fish and free-range poultry. Our technology is significantly more efficient at producing protein than traditional methods of production as our insects are vertically farmed and not restricted to floor space or area. Thanks to our automated system we can produce at industrial scale and offer farmers a cost-effective and sustainable alternative to soymeal and fishmeal.

Feanix is a trailblazing force in the trillion-dollar animal breeding industry. Feanix leverages proprietary genetic testing advancements to provide genetics and breeding as a service.

At Future Fields, we’re changing the world - one fruit fly at a time. We’ve developed a novel insect-based expression platform that allows us to make the world’s most scalable and sustainable recombinant proteins.

We've built over last 4 years on precision farming, hydroponics and core agronomy. We make vertical farming affordable and accessible to everyone.

Brothers, Michael and Jack, started Beanstalk as a solution to solve a local restaurant’s need for consistent, high-quality salad. In doing so, they created a vertical farming technology capable of growing lettuces, spinach, basil, carrots, lavender, and more. Beanstalk is at the nexus of industrial robotics, plant science, and the culinary arts. Our technology enables us to develop new products quickly, automate traditionally labor-intensive work, and connect consumers to fresh produce in ways not before seen.

Technology that simplifies farming. Get timely, unbiased information to improve yield, eliminate waste, and maximize the profitability of every acre.

Tule helps farmers make irrigation decisions. Using UC Davis research-based technology, our hardware sensor provides growers with field-scale crop water use measurements (i.e., actual evapotranspiration), crop water stress measurements, applied irrigation measurements, and irrigation recommendations. Using the latest AI technology and our unprecedented crop water stress dataset, our latest product, Tule Vision, provides growers with the water stress of their plants just by taking a picture with their mobile phone.