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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

sensors

InnerPlant Raises $5.65M to Turn Plants Into “Living Sensors” and Mitigate Crop Loss

Agtech company InnerPlant, which is changing plant DNA to create “living sensors” that mitigate crop loss, has raised $5.65 million in pre-seed and seed funding, according to an official announcement sent to The Spoon. The round was led by MS&AD Ventures, the investment arm of Japan’s MS&AD Insurance Group. Bee Partners, Up West, and TAU Ventures also participated in the round. 

InnerPlant created its technology platform to spot threats to plant growth — pests, nutrient deficiencies, water stress, etc. — quicker than is possible via traditional farming methods. To do that, the company recodes plant DNA to include a fluorescent safe-for-human-consumption protein that lights up the leaves of a plant when there is a problem. Essentially, it is turning the entire plant into a living signal that can “talk” to the farmer when there is a problem. Different colored lights indicate different issues.  

Since these signals are invisible to the human eye, farmers can use InnerPlant’s augmented reality system to photograph their fields and view potential problems via an iPhone or iPad. The signals can also be detected via a drone flying overhead or even a satellite.

This handy explainer video goes into more detail:

According to the company, it only takes tens of these sensor plants to protect an entire field. Once the signal plants send off a distress signal, a farmer can address the impacted area before it spreads to the whole crop. For example, if a harmful fungi breaks out in one area of a field, a farmer can get rid of only the impacted plants, instead of spraying the whole field with fungicide. Think of it as on-demand crop protection.  

InnerPlant says its entire concept is merely piggy-backing off the natural signals plants send to one another when they are in distress. Recoding the DNA to include the protein is “amplifying” these natural signals, so that farmers can spot problems faster. It also frees them from what InnerPlant founder and CEO Shely Aronov calls “the pesticide treadmill,” which is our increasing use of chemicals and pesticides that harm waterways, impact microbial diversity in soil, and are linked to some cancers.

It remains to be seen how consumers will feel about eating produce with recoded DNA, or how that message will get effectively communicated. And since InnerPlant is a relatively new company (it released its first product, the InnerTomato, in 2020), it is too soon to have much data on how effective these living plant sensors are compared to other modes of crop protection. 

The technology does, however, show us yet-another possibility for improving crop yields and mitigating loss in the food system at a time when the world’s population is growing. 

InnerPlant says it is currently working on a new product, InnerSoy. Funds from the seed and pre-seed rounds will go towards developing other products in future. 

Nordetect Raises $1.5M for Lab-on-a-Chip Controlled Ag Analysis

Nordetect, a Danish startup that provides portable nutrient testing for indoor and vertical farms, announced yesterday that it has raised a $1.5 million round of Seed funding. The round was led by Luminate NY with participation from Rockstart, SOSV (HAX), PreSeed Ventures and Vækstfonden (The Danish Growth Fund).

The company was founded in 2016 and makes a “lab-on-a-chip” testing device that can analyze agricultural samples for nutrients such as Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium and more. Nordetect’s one-click device and test kits can test conducts multiple tests in a matter of minutes.

For indoor and controlled ag farms, Nordetect says that its test can help growers maintain and balance proper levels of nutrients, water and light for greater crop yields.

There are plenty of ag sensor companies helping farmers better understand their growing conditions. However, soil sensor companies like CropX, Arable and Teralytic are all built for outdoor use. Given the rush of funding that went into and the expansion of indoor farms last year, there will undoubtedly be a number of sensor solutions that come to market for the controlled ag space. With all of that increased funding and expansion, indoor ag companies will need to maximize their yield to prove out the promise of controlled agriculture

Last August, Nordetect’s technology won top honors (and €10,000) at agtech company Priva’s Horti Heroes challenge, which showcased innovative horticultural companies. In this week’s press announcement, Nordetect said that it will use its new funding to commercialize it technology platform and give indoor and vertical farmers in the U.S and Western Europe early access to its lab-on-a-chip analysis devices.

Aryballe Announces New Digital Nose Sensor

Aryballe, the French startup that makes a “digital nose,” today announced a new version of its odor detection sensor. The company claims the new sensor is high-volume, lower cost and small enough to be built into consumer appliances.

The new sensor is smaller than a paperclip and is equipped with Aryballe’s proprietary combination of biosensors, which capture odors in seconds. Aryballe’s software then matches the signals captured with a database of previously collected and analyzed odors to mimic the human sense of smell.

Use cases for Aryballe’s digital nose in the kitchen include the ability for an oven to “smell” when food is about to burn and automatically shut off, or in your fridge to notify you when food is spoiling or at peak ripeness. Taking it one step further, the fridge could then automatically add food you need to replace to a grocery shopping list.

Aryballe debuted its handheld, standalone NeOse Pro device at CES back in 2018. In July of last year the company raised a €6.2 million Series B round led by International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), and at that time the company said miniaturization for consumer devices was on its roadmap for 2020.

In today’s press announcement, Aryballe said that its new sensor will be shown at CES this week, and available later this year with the first samples shipping in Q2.

Aryballe isn’t the only digital nose on display at CES this year. Stratuscent‘s eNose, which uses chemical sensors, artificial intelligence and is based on NASA patents, will be demonstrated at the show as well.

Why Synthetic Sensors Could Be The Future Of Smart Kitchen Monitoring

Will the smart kitchen of the future be stocked with arrays of distributed sensors or could a single suite of sensors, localized on a credit-card sized housing, plug into an outlet to imbue the kitchen with all the intelligence it needs? According to Carnegie Mellon researchers in the Future Interfaces Group, the latter concept is highly promising.

The Future Interfaces Group has developed a synthetic sensor-based device that can monitor multiple types of phenomena in a room, including sounds, vibration, light, heat, electromagnetic noise, and temperature. This device, featuring nine sensors, can determine whether a faucet’s left or right spigot is running, if the microwave door is open or how many paper towels have been dispensed.

“The idea is you can plug this in and immediately turn a room into a smart environment,” said Gierad Laput, a Ph.D. student in CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). “You don’t have to go out and buy expensive smart appliances, which probably can’t talk to each other anyway, or attach sensors to everything you want to monitor, which can be both hard to maintain and ugly. You just plug it into an outlet.”

Machine learning algorithms combine raw data feeds into powerful synthetic sensors that can identify a wide range of events and objects. For example, they can distinguish between a blender, coffee grinder, and mixer based on sounds and vibrations.

The CMU researchers discuss the technology in the following video and have been demonstrating it at recent conferences:

Synthetic Sensors: Towards General-Purpose Sensing

“Smart appliances are expensive and rarely talk to one another,” the researchers note. “We’ve explored an alternate, general purpose sensing approach where a single, highly capable sensor board can indirectly monitor an entire room. We started our research by taking an inventory of sensors used in commercial and academic systems. Our sensor board is plug-and-play, uses wall power and connects to our cloud over WiFi.”

CMU researchers are also expanding the types of data feeds that the sensors work with. For example, the sensors can infer human activity, such as when someone has left for work, and the sensors can be trained to recognize various phenomena, such as the cycling of heating and air conditioning units. In addition, the sensors can be trained to detect many popular devices and brands of kitchen products

Google, through the GIoTTo Expedition Project, has supported the CMU research, as has the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.  Google is also actively pursuing its Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which are similar in concept to the general purpose sensors from Carnegie Mellon.

The CMU sensing concepts are, of course, joining many other imaginative new ideas for sensors that could impact smart kitchens. For example, NeOse is a new device that connects to smartphones and databases and can recognize more than 50 types of odors. This smell-sensing device could detect when a food item is spoiled in a refrigerator, when food is being overcooked, and more.

Make sure to check out the Smart Kitchen Summit, the only event about the future of food, cooking, and the kitchen. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets. Also, make sure to subscribe to get The Spoon in your inbox.