Building Affordable Robots

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Building a successful ag-tech startup requires a problem to be solved, a clear vision, capital, and really knowing your customer. Jaisimha Rao says when he founded NIQO Robotics, he focused on building efficient robots and frugal engineering because that’s what farmer customers need.

Rao... "We use a Sony sensor, so that's made in Japan. We use an Nvidia chip made in the U.S. We train on a cloud, Microsoft Azure cloud in Seattle. So we don't have any pricing competitive advantage just because we are in India. So the only way we are better than say some of our competition is our engineering philosophy is frugality. And by frugality it doesn't mean cheap. It's squeezing out more from less. So when we build our robot, we take the entry-level chips and figure out how can we squeeze out more compute through pure software engineering so that we don't pass on that expense to the growers. I think some of the other ag robotics startups, at least in the U.S., you don't have to be so frugal upfront. And it's very hard to build a more efficient robot when you already established your tech stack. So for us, since our first target customer was India, was razor-thin margins, we were able to build for that customer and then move here."

NIQO Robotics has recently started expanding to North America.