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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Intello Labs

Intello Labs Raises $5.9M for its AI-Based Food Grading

Intello Labs, which uses a combination of computer vision and artificial intelligence to grade food quality along the supply chain, announced today that it has raised a $5.9 million Series A. Saama Capital led the round with participation from global agritech funds GROW (Singapore) and SVG Ventures THRIVE (USA), and existing investors Omnivore and Nexus Venture Partners. This brings the total amount raised by Intello to $8.3 million.

Based in Gurgaon, India, Intello Labs offers a suite of computer vision products and cloud-based AI that can be used by farmers, food packers, exporters and retailers to assess the quality of fruits and vegetables. The goal is to bring transparency and objectivity to the food buying and selling business and establish fair prices throughout the supply chain. By having AI judge food grades, you eliminate haggling between biased people over what a particular bushel of apples is worth, for example.

When we first wrote about the company in 2018, it was focused on rural farmers and only used smartphone cameras to capture images of food. Finding that smaller farmers were more apprehensive about working with technology, Intello shifted to work with bigger, more corporate clients last year.

The company offers a number of different assessment tools:

  • Intello Track uses smartphone cameras to capture images of produce, which are analyzed by Intello’s cloud to assess size, color, and defects before returning a food grade.
  • Intello Sort is a machine that separates produce based on quality.
  • Intello Pack can be used to monitor produce as it is being packed for shipment
  • Intello Deep is a handheld scanner that detects Brix , pH , TSS, dry matter, moisture, pesticide residue

Intello isn’t the only company using AI and computer vision to assist with the assessment of fresh fruits and vegetables. AgShift offers similar services and launched its Hydra scanning system for bulk inspections last year.

Quickly and fairly assessing food quality has taken on greater importance during this time of global pandemic. Mass restaurant closings and general upheaval revealed the weaknesses and inequalities in our food supply chain with farmers throwing out tons of food. Tools like Intello Labs’ can bring efficiency to the food buying process and help keep the world fed.

Intello Labs Raises $2M, Takes its AI to the Skies with Drones for Crop Assessments

Intello Labs, which uses computer vision and AI to assess food quality, announced last week that it has raised a $2 million seed round from Nexus Venture Partners and Omnivore. This brings the total amount raised by Intello to roughly $2.4 million.

A few things have changed for Intello Labs since we last checked in with the company almost a year ago. Back then it was using its computer vision and AI to create a neutral food grade to help farmers earn a fair price for their crops. With an AI-based grade, farmers were better able to defend and earn higher prices from picky buyers who might try to question the quality of the produce to pay less.

Sreevidya Ghantasala, a Research and Development Analyst at Intello Labs who also heads up its U.S. operations (the company is headquartered in India), told me in a phone interview that the company is moving away from independent farmers and more towards corporate ones. “We believe independent farmers are apprehensive about using new technology,” Ghantasala said.

Additionally, Intello Labs is also moving on up, literally, and using its computer vision and AI platform with drones. Previously, Intello only worked with smartphone cameras with which parties involved would take pictures of food and submit it to Intello’s cloud for analysis.

With the move to drones, Intello has been able to expand its features and crop capabilities. Its software has now been used by drones flying over rice fields to count flowers that will produce rice seeds. Ghantasala said that having successfully completed this expansion into aerial image taking and rice, Intello is working with the rice producer to broaden into even more applications.

Intello Labs isn’t the only company using computer vision and AI to do crop assessments. AgShift does pretty much the same thing, though as Intello appears to be going further into the fields with drones, AgShift is diving deeper into the supply chain with the recent launch of its bulk food inspector.

Ghantasala said that Intello Labs will be using this seed round to establish a larger presence in the U.S. as well as improve the company’s technology.

Intello Labs Uses AI to Help Farmers Get a Fair Price for Their Crops

When we talk about artificial intelligence (AI), we often speak in giant, world-shifting terms about revolutionizing a certain industry. But AI can also benefit a single person at a time. In the case of Intello Labs, its AI can be used to help prevent a poor farmer from getting screwed.

Food inspection is often still done manually. One person’s perfect tomato may be another’s piece of trash, and these basic biases can lead to an imbalance of power. A poor, rural, farmer may not be educated on price points or what “fresh” produce means to a buyer. As a result, they may want to sell tomatoes at a dollar per tomato, but buyers may scoff, refuting the quality of those tomatoes, and only offer fifty cents. How are they to know how much the literal fruits of their labor are actually worth?

Intello Labs is working to help balance these scales through a combination of computer vision and artificial intelligence. Using their mobile phone app, the tomato farmer could take a picture of a bushel of tomatoes and upload it into Intello’s system. The company’s algorithms would examine the photo of the tomatoes and gives it a rating based on a set of government (i.e. USDA) or other criteria. With this objective, algorithmic rating in place, each party in the negotiation now knows the quality of the tomatoes being sold — and they can be priced accordingly.

The company started with commodities like tomatoes and potatoes, but according to Sreevidya Ghantasala, Intello Labs Head of U.S. Operations, the company’s core technology can be customized for almost any food. It could be used to rate products like seafood and chicken, or even as a tool for plant disease identification. “We have a pest and disease application for six or seven different crops,” said Ghantasala, “Our system is highly customizeable. If there’s something we don’t see on our library, we can update it in 2 to 3 months.”

Intello, which is headquartered in Bengaluru, India, has already gone live elsewhere in that country at the farmer’s market in Rajasthan to work with 10,000 farmers there for wheat and grain analysis. The company has also worked with the Reliance Foundation in India to help 100,000 farmers with pest and disease detection for crops.

Pricing for Intello’s software is subscription based, and Ghantasala wouldn’t provide specific numbers. She said that cost was dependent on what was being analyzed, and what users want to use it to detect. The company was founded in May 2016, and has raised money through friends, families and various different accelerator programs. It now has 30 employees across offices in Bengaluru, Stockholm, Sweden and Plano, Texas.

Intello isn’t the only one using computer vision and AI to generate objective food ratings. Here in the U.S., AgShift is using a similar mobile phone app to provide better data for food buyers in the supply chain to help reduce food waste. And grocery giant Walmart has implemented its own machine learning-based Eden technology to assess food freshness.

But according to Ghantasala, Intello’s ambitions go beyond food altogether. The company is working with gas and oil companies in Sweden to apply its computer vision to parts identification, and they want to expand its vision into hyperspectral imaging for more in-depth analysis.

Intello, it seems, wants to use its AI to change the world. But for now, it’s changing the world for one farmer at a time.