Google parent company Alphabet has added a new company to its portfolio this week in Mineral, a farm tech startup that spent the last five years incubating within Google’s X.
The news of Mineral’s graduation to full-fledged Alphabet company came in the form a blog post by Mineral CEO Elliott Grant (previously of Shopwell, a shopping startup sold to Innit). According to Grant, the mission behind Mineral is to “help scale sustainable agriculture”, which they are doing by “developing a platform and tools that help gather, organize, and understand never-before known or understood information about the plant world – and make it useful and actionable.”
According to Mineral, they have analyzed over 10% of the total farmland on Earth, modeled more than 200 plant traits, phenotyped 17 crop varieties, and developed more than 80 high-performance ML models. Mineral’s ag-optimized analysis tools will be used to process large unstructured sets of the world’s agricultural data, sourced from satellite images, farm equipment, public databases, and Mineral’s own proprietary data streams. The company will make this data available to partners to combine this data with their private data to derive insights into yield, genomic understanding, and agronomic discovery.
One such partner is Driscoll’s. The large berry company has been working with Mineral to explore ways to improve data collection in its breeding operations and work on better yield forecasting. The two also worked together to enhance berry inspection using Mineral’s perception tools and, according to Driscoll’s, was able to build a system that many believe performed similarly to human experts.
Another Mineral project Mineral was the creation of a special crop-roving robot named Don Roverto. Don Roverto was used by Mineral to assist the Alliance for Biodiversity and CIAT to accelerate their work to understand and uncover hidden crop traits within the world’s largest bean collection. Using Don Roverto, the Alliance, after thirty years of searching, found a “magic” bean with intrinsic drought-resistant characteristics.
Google has often used X to incubate mission-based startups, and Mineral is no different. According to Grant, they chose ag as a vertical because it is “increasingly believed to be a major contributor to the climate crisis — but it is also a victim of a changing climate. There is no time to waste to find more climate-resilient crop varieties, to transition to less chemical- and fossil fuel-intensive practices, to improve soil health, and to restore biodiversity.”
