Napa-based AI for vineyards closes $3 million in funding

Scout, a Napa County-based farm management software company driven by AI that empowers growers to optimize quality, yield, and financial results, closed a deal for $3 million in seed funding from various investors.

The company captures photos of vineyards at the ground level and uses artificial intelligence to analyze the photos and provide actionable data on the crops.

“It’s like giving superhuman powers to farmers,” Scout CEO Kia Behnia said. “They now essentially have X-ray vision. Our company is all about providing data and insights to help farmers farm better and smarter.”

David Schwab, founder and managing director of Vertical Venture Partners, said AI has the potential to transform many industries, including insurance, biotech, construction and agriculture. His Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm is leading the investment into Scout.

“Kia, Mason (Earles) and the founding team at Scout have direct, personal experience with the problem they are solving and understand the customers they are selling to,” Schwab said. “Their focus on market segments, specifically vineyards in Napa and Sonoma and extensive track record for innovation was another key criteria for our investment.”

Prior to owning a vineyard in Napa, Behnia was a technology executive focused on data platforms. The software he utilized would help inform his partners to make data-driven decisions. From retail shopping to financial services, they shared a common denominator — by surfacing the most important data to decision-makers, it gave them an easy way to take action based on insights.

Scout operates similarly but for farming. The traditional vineyard management approach is to walk the vineyards and investigate plants one by one.

“It is a manual, time-intensive process that we could really only do once a year,” Behnia said.

Behnia took a precision viticulture class taught by assistant professor Mason Earles at UC Davis and learned what was possible by using GoPro and other cameras to take thousands of images of vineyards.

It wasn’t long before Behnia, who came in as a customer, became an adviser of the tech and ultimately joined the Scout founding team as CEO. The technology that originally piqued his interest was how it recreated the feeling of walking through the vineyard by utilizing cameras attached to tractors.

By employing artificial intelligence, Scout analyzes vineyard activities through ground-level photographs, offering actionable information. Their approach is to capture images from 20 distinct angles per plant, ensuring unparalleled resolution and granularity down to the level of individual plants.”

Scout’s origins began five years ago in a research lab led by Earles at UC Davis, which owns a 2% stake in the company.

Since last year’s growing season, Scout has used AI to capture and analyze millions of photos from vineyards in Napa and Sonoma counties, and continues to extract insights from the data, according to Earles.

“Without rapid development of AI in the last five years, this would not be possible. We are using standard cameras attached to ATVs and tractors, but AI allows the data to be actionable,” Behnia said.

The data is used to benefit farmers in four primary ways, starting with creating an automated inventory and classification of all plants across vineyards.

“We start with each block of the vineyard. We then learn how many vines, what percentage are rootstocks, and how many young versus old vines,” Behnia said.

Plants are monitored by an automated process throughout the growing season to maximize the quality and yield.

“Ag tech in the ‘50s and ‘60s was about the rapid development of herbicides and pesticides; today, it is about organic farming,” he said.

To achieve this, he said, it’s about managing at the vine level, “which was never commercially or technologically feasible before.”

“Thousands of vines analyzed in a matter of minutes, and we can quickly see where the problems are, whether it be rodents, soil, malnutrition, or another issue,” Behnia said.

The third benefit is the fruit evaluation component, estimating yields based on counting clusters and noting their size. “The pictures allow us to analyze color changes and when there are areas to further ripen fruit,” he added.

The final benefit is the in-depth analysis of the vineyard and vintage. This translates to time series measurements and the ability to detect patterns that aren’t visible.

Behnia, who uses Scout in his vineyard Neotempo, has accurately predicted his exact harvest date for the last three years straight, he said, with Scout analyzing 1.2 million images and identifying weak vines that were replanted last year.

Scout has six paying customers to date — some are big brand names, while others have large acreage counts.

The company is growing its customer base, as well as its internal team, hiring talent directly from UC Davis.

“We hire the best enology and ag talent from Davis, as well as computer science and AI. The team continues to grow every week, from Napa and Sonoma as well,” Behnia said.