Taranis Smart Scouting Nets $40 Million Investment

Taranis has raised an additional $40 million to further accelerate the use of and development of its smart scouting platform. To date, Taranis has raised $100 million in funding. 

With three years of commercial experience, the platform is aiming to be the glue sticking trusted advisers even closer to farmers by providing insights to yield threats out in the field. Its current user base includes more than 100 ag retailers and consultants who use Taranis to deliver crop intelligence insights empowering more informed decision making to help make crop management more efficient. 

“Taranis helps make better relationship and better decisions in agriculture,” says Mike DiPaola, Taranis Chief Commercial Officer. “With our leaf-level insights, you can see and understand what’s going on in a field and then manage yield threats through good data and good analysis to improve the farmer’s bottom line.” 

DiPaola says Taranis is creating content that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world, but they are applying technologies used in other industries with great customer success including Ring doorbells and digital baby monitors. 

Via remote sensing, Taranis collects and analyzes leaf-level resolution of fields to identify weeds, diseases, insects, and nutrient deficiencies. The company has been assembling its artificial intelligence engine for seven years with more than 200 million AI-data points. 

“This doesn’t replace scouting, it just makes it better,” he says. “And it changes the way retailers can offer services and how farmers are able to manage their farms. The technology is creating the ability for retailers to focus on relationships and provide a new solution at scale.” 

DiPaola shares three key deliverables for Taranis: 

• Scalable: the company has focused on acquiring large amounts of data to amplify the type of insights available
• Analyzation: content is collected and then analyzed efficiently and economically. 
• Usable: Taranis is available as a web application and mobile app

Specific to the past couple of years, DiPaola says the company has improved their product and its value. 

“If you want this for your fields, all you have to do is talk to us. We’ve solved a number of obstacles and hurdles for an adviser to get this and work with their growers. So really, to get started, we need two things: planting date and field boundaries,” DiPaola says. 

This fall, the team is going to the field with “combine guides.” 

“This is a way to know before you go to the field so you can remember the start the crop got—which we have as stand counts—the threats to field—which we have with data and visuals—so we can arm retailers with information they need for next year and farmers know why they got the yield they got,” DiPaola says. “When you see it ringing 230 bu it reminds you of the start you got, the decisions you made.”