As climate change accelerates the transition from open-field agriculture to greenhouse agriculture, solutions that efficiently manage complex greenhouse environments have become more critical. Croft, a Korean startup that provides AI-based smart farm solutions, has attracted seed investment from Future Play. The investment amount is confidential.
Croft is an artificial intelligence smart farm startup that develops a system to monitor crops in greenhouses and provides farmers with optimal, cutting-edge automatic greenhouse control solutions. The Croft team, which consists of technical experts with more than 10 years of experience in each field, such as young farmers, AI and deep learning experts, robotics experts, and full-stack developers, produces products that can operate precisely in a natural greenhouse environment.
Croft secures crop growth data that could not be utilized in existing smart farm solutions through a machine learning-based crop monitoring system. It is highly applicable in the greenhouse agricultural environment in that it can respond to various greenhouse environmental variables and maximizes farmhouses’ productivity and energy efficiency.
In addition, Croft’s crop monitoring system is designed based on a lightweight image-based smart sensor, edge computing-based crop growth estimation algorithm, data collection API (application program interface) and greenhouse control auxiliary system, enabling more precise and professional crop control.
Choi Jae-woong, director of Future Play who led this investment, said, “In the case of the existing smart farm solution, there is no monitoring solution for the growth status of crops, so there was a limit to having to rely entirely on the judgment of the grower to adjust the environmental variables inside and outside the greenhouse. We decided to invest in Croft because experts who have achieved excellent results in the autonomous greenhouse competition held in the Netherlands are building a cutting-edge greenhouse based on a precise crop monitoring system. They have a team that can directly enter the European market.”
Hee-kyung Ryu, CEO of Croft, said, “Through this investment, we plan to secure product development and professional research personnel, build our state-of-the-art greenhouse suitable for using AI solutions within this year, and produce and sell actual crops. We will materialize the solutions necessary to operate advanced greenhouses and verify them in actual greenhouses.”
Meanwhile, Croft has proven its technological prowess by winning first place in the preliminaries at the ‘AI Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge’ held in the Netherlands even before the establishment of the corporation.
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