James grew up on a farm outside of Cape Town, learning firsthand the challenges faced by his family and community of growers. Years later, at university, he met Benji and together they decided to see how they could use their combined skills in aeronautics and machine learning to find ways to solve the challenges faced by the agricultural sector.

In the beginning, James and Benji brought together a team to assemble their own drones and fly them on James’ family farm. They were soon able to validate that they could use artificial intelligence to process aerial imagery, and identify problems invisible to the naked eye.

It became clear that beyond healthy trees, yield estimation is one of the most challenging questions to answer in agriculture, so they marshalled a team of machine learning and data science experts to help growers solve this problem. 

Today, we have measured and analyzed millions of pieces of fruit to help growers, packers and shipper of fruit improve their packouts and profitability.