FarmBlox

“To this day, we still send three D printed parts to our customers. So we have these brackets that go on our On our monitor box that actually allow bungee cords to attach them to trees for maple.”

“We found maple syrup as a sort of our beachhead market, and we helped them find leaks in their SAP collection tubes, something that takes them like, 18 hours a day, every day during the season to find, and we help automate that.”

“We don't actually use the large language models today in our product. So this is more traditional machine learning, you know, from proprietary data like time series data.”

“If with us, it's very sticky because if you put something physical out in your fields, there's very little of an incentive to switch once you do that.”

“So for the most part, it's all our own hardware. So up until like our 5000th device sold, we were actually assembling it ourselves as well.”

“Now we're out in California, which you just moved the company out here. And helping, you know, big orchards find a copper theft. That's sort of a, our next sort of tip the spear way to get into that market.”

“One of the things that I remember that really transformed our pitch when fundraising was go deep on your personal story, like way deeper than you think you need to not, it's not just your resume. It's like you as a person, especially for you know, early stage.”

“We're more focused on what are called permanent specialty crops. So the things that you actually eat every day, things that you don't harvest and like pull up out of the ground. So think of like orchards, vineyards you know, maple syrup is a big one that we're…”

“One of the first things we did with AI was find leaks, intelligently find leaks in irrigation. And the only way you could do that was with AI and lots of data. But to the farmer, we don't advertise it as AI. It's just another tool to help save labor.”

“So that's why we focus on very specific problems on the farm. It's problems where in your head, you can actually calculate the ROI of deploying a sensor solution.”

“We bootstrapped to the first like 50 customers or so. We, you know closed our first investment round last year. So it's been about a year and a half since we got VC backed.”