糖心视频

Once grain is harvested, it sits in siloes and other containers until it is sold. Farmers manually inspect the grain, but that often is not enough to combat grain spoilage.

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Enter , a Sunnyvale, California-based company that is digitizing the post-harvest grain supply chain using advanced Internet of Things, real-time environmental monitoring and cloud-based artificial intelligence. The process mitigates spoilage, reduces quality degradation, reduces energy costs and increases worker safety, TeleSense co-founder and CEO told Crunchbase News.

鈥淥nce you harvest the grain, it never gets better, but can you predict when it goes bad?鈥� he said. 鈥淭here was patchy data prior, but if you can have continuous data coming in with AI, you can take prescriptive action and make decisions. We can be 95 percent accurate of what might happen.鈥�

The company closed on a $10.2 million Series B round of financing led by existing investor . New investors joining the round included , and , as well as existing investor . With the new round, TeleSense has raised a total of $17 million since its inception in 2014, Zafar said. That includes a round in 2018, according to Crunchbase data.

Finistere Ventures also led TeleSense鈥檚 Series A round, and , co-founder and partner, said in an interview that the company brought a unique take to post-harvest management.

鈥淲hen we saw what Naeem was building around the commodity supply chain and the track record he had established in both hardware and enterprise software, we knew TeleSense would be redefining how grain is stored, handled and traded,鈥� he said.

In addition to the investment, TeleSense added , former CEO of , and , CEO of , to its board of directors.

Meanwhile, the market size is estimated to be valued at $1.3 billion this year and projected to reach $1.6 billion by 2025, according to a Research and Markets report.

Zafar is expecting 500 percent growth from last year, and another 500 percent next year. He also expects to grow the employee base to 70 next year from 50.

He intends to put the new funding to work growing the sales and data science teams, speeding up production of the hardware and software, and signing up dealers to represent the product. Zafar also plans to create a monthly or quarterly subscription model for the hardware and software in order to scale.

鈥淲e will bring in dealers and hire direct sales people in Australia and Europe,鈥� he said. 鈥淲e are just getting started. In the middle of 2021, we will go into the Black Sea region and Brazil. Then in 2022, enter the rest of Asia.鈥�

Photo of spear in grain courtesy of TeleSense
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