Agri-tech startup, AgShift has reportedly raised $2 million in a seed funding round led by Exfinity Ventures. “We have proven our core technology working with great partners. Now, with new capital, we will work towards strengthening our development team and maturing the product for specific enterprise and use cases as we continue to establish AgShift as a standard and platform of choice for autonomous food inspection,” said Miku Jha, Founder and CEO of Agshift, in a statement.

The California-based startup is currently developing the world’s first autonomous food inspection system. It is employing machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques in order to reduce global food waste. The company plans to use the funding obtained to strengthen its product development and expand its customer reach. The system being developed by AgShift seeks to replace the traditional systems of food inspection that are paper based and tedious. The company is currently working with a select group of leaders in the food industry to bring its solution to the market.

“Inconsistent and subjective inspections result in a loss of nearly $15.6 billion a year for the organisations responsible, not counting the millions of dollars in recovery costs, claim management and loss of brand reputation incurred by them,” Jha added.

The startup is employing a number of methods to modernise the food inspection process such as digitising product specifications, using a mobile first approach for operational efficiencies and leveraging deep learning. Additionally, AgShift also makes quality assessments as per the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) specifications. The startup’s patented models study the defects in sample images and predict the overall quality of the sample. The platform makes use of curated real world image sets to teach the software to detect and analyze defects in samples with greater accuracy and consistency.

“We have just begun to see the capabilities that this technology can bring to the food industry. AgShift can make a huge impact on reducing 1.3 billion tons of annual food loss and waste – a complex, real world challenge for everyone,” Miku Jha said.

This is the first investment made by Exfinity Ventures in the agriculture technology space.

(Picture courtesy: Thrive Agtech)