MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Blue River Technology has announced it has raised $10 million in Series A-1 funding led by Data Collective Venture Capital. Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors joined the round as a new investor, and existing investor Khosla Ventures also participated. With this new funding, the company plans to further expand its engineering team and product offering.

“Blue River has taken huge strides towards reinventing food production in a world of growing populations and scarce resources”

Over the past three years, Blue River Technology has developed and successfully commercialized revolutionary robotic systems that unlock greater yield potential in agriculture. Rather than the current approach of applying chemicals inefficiently across entire fields, Blue River is building a future in which “every plant counts” – where the needs of each plant are measured and inputs are applied precisely in the required dosage. Blue River’s first commercial application is used to identify and precisely eliminate unwanted plants in lettuce production. The company is also working to extend its innovative plant recognition systems and big data techniques for application with row crops like corn and soybeans, which can benefit from phenotyping for crop breeding as well as precise weed control.

“Blue River has taken huge strides towards reinventing food production in a world of growing populations and scarce resources,” said Jorge Heraud, co-founder and CEO of Blue River Technology. “With our new funding, we’re looking to hire passionate engineers and scientists to help us advance the boundaries of computer vision, machine learning, robotics and agriculture in order to solve real-world problems.”

“Blue River is taking a very innovative and practical approach to solving one of the world’s top problems – how to produce more food in a responsible way,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “I’m impressed by how quickly the company brought its first product to market and how successful it has been. This high-caliber Blue River team has assembled leading experts spanning both cutting-edge technology and agriculture, and I believe they are in a great position to lead the next generation of environmentally-friendly precision agriculture.”

“Blue River is leveraging three important trends: machine learning, data-driven agriculture and robotics,” said Matt Ocko, founding partner of Data Collective Venture Capital. “This approach has the potential to revolutionize how we produce food in the near future.”