Aydi, an AI-powered platform that helps farmers succeed, has raised $7.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by COTU Ventures, Daltex, and Nuwa Capital, with support from Magrabi Agriculture and Foundation Ventures.
The funds will be used to launch and grow Orth, an AI agronomy assistant. Orth gives farmers real-time, personalized advice to deal with rising costs, climate challenges, and a shortage of experts.
“Closing the seed round is a major milestone for Aydi and validates our mission to give every grower access to world-class agronomy,” – said Hassan Fayed, founder and CEO of Aydi. “Experts say global food demand is set to rise 70% by 2050. However, according to our company’s internal estimates, 90% of growers lack access to timely agronomic expertise, given there is only 1 agronomist per 10,000 acres worldwide. Orth changes that by turning decades of agricultural science into an easy-to-use AI assistant that gives farmers instant recommendations, detects problems early, and helps them grow higher-quality crops.”
Orth is powered by a smart engine that combines satellite and weather tracking, data analysis from millions of points, and conversational AI to give instant answers.
This technology helps farmers get very precise, plot-level insights, improving yields and efficiency by more than 20%. These strong results have attracted solid backing from investors.
“From the very beginning, we were inspired by Hassan’s relentless drive to tackle one of the world’s most pressing challenges: how to help growers thrive in the face of climate and cost pressures.” – shared Amir Farha, Founder of COTU Ventures. We believe that agriculture needs its AI moment, and Orth has the ability to empower millions of growers to farm smarter and more profitably, and produce more efficiently and sustainably.”
“We have been supporters of Aydi since ideation and we are happy to deepen the partnership in this current funding round,” – said Nitin Reen, Partner at Nuwa Capital. “With the advent of AI, there is a growing opportunity to digitize what has been, comparatively, an analog industry. Orth gives all farm operators access to agronomy specific information and recommendations which was historically reserved for large scale farms, thus democratizing access to this expertise. We believe that this has the power to truly transform the industry and we are excited to see how the next couple of years unfolds”.
Ibrahim El Naggar, VP of Operations at Daltex added, “Understanding field context is one of the most difficult challenges facing technology solutions in the agriculture space. Aydi & Orth provide growers with the ability to capture, own, and understand their field data by leveraging AI to enhance on-ground operational insights. This is a solution for growers, by growers.”
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