BOSTON, Ma. — American Robotics, a drone developer specializing in agricultural automation, announced it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding. The round was led by angel investors and included Brain Robotics Capital LLC, a fund focused on science-backed companies in the AI, Robotics, and IoT industries.

The funding will be used to further develop American Robotics’ integrated drone system for commercial farming and to expand the team. This is the first seed round for the company, founded by alumni from Carnegie Mellon and Stanford universities, which will pilot its product this summer.

The U.S. agricultural industry loses billions of dollars of crops annually to preventable problems and spends billions in chemicals, water, and other inputs fighting this loss. In 2012, $17.5 billion of crops were lost to due to drought and heat damage alone.

Furthermore, every year U.S. farmers lose 12% of their crops to pests and another 12% to disease. Traditional scouting solutions are not adequate and agtech is looking to automation and big data to improve agricultural decision-making and yields.

American Robotics is based in the MassRobotics collaboration space in Boston, an emerging hub for robotics startups.