Orchard Robotics is tackling agriculture's data problem: most farms still lack precise, plant-level visibility into how crops are developing. The company's FruitScope Vision System is an AI-powered camera array that mounts onto any tractor or farm vehicle and captures imagery as it drives through fields, generating granular data on individual plants.
That imagery feeds FruitScope Vault & OS, a system-of-record that tracks the growth, health and yield of millions of plants over time. Growers can forecast harvests more accurately, optimize labor and inputs, and make data-driven decisions that were previously impossible at scale. The company describes its broader ambition as building 'the AI farmer.'
Orchard was founded in 2022 by Charlie Wu, a Cornell dropout and Thiel Fellow inspired by his grandparents' apple farms in China. The technology is already in use on some of the largest apple and grape farms in the US, and has expanded to blueberries, cherries, almonds, pistachios, citrus and strawberries.
In September 2025 Orchard announced an oversubscribed $22 million Series A led by Quiet Capital and Shine Capital, with participation from General Catalyst, Contrary and notable angels including F1 champion Nico Rosberg and Yext founder Howard Lerman. The company is based in San Francisco with an office in Seattle.
Orchard's thesis is that precise, continuous crop data is the foundation for the next wave of farm automation, and that a vehicle-mounted vision system is the fastest way to capture it at scale.
