Announced earlier today, Mineral, Alphabet’s ag company, will wind down its operations.
“Mineral will no longer be an Alphabet company, and our technology will live on inside of leading agribusinesses where they can have maximum impact,” said Mineral CEO Elliott Grant in a blog post.
Mineral was founded in 2018 as part of X, the moonshot factory of Alphabet, and it had about 100 team members.
What did Mineral develop and build:
• an image database of more than 17 crops in every stage of growth in multiple environments.
• A four-wheeled semi-autonomous rover platform with multiple configurations and the core functionality as a data collection machine.
• in-field harvest analysis and post-harvest crop condition ratings for berry crops in partnership with Driscoll’s
• a geospatial analysis platform that has collected more than 450 million acres of farmland.
• Phenotyping databases and analysis
• And additional machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies.
Here’s a link to previous coverage about Mineral.
Driscoll’s has confirmed it will license the tech it partnered with Mineral to develop.
“Mineral had partnered closely with Driscoll’s - the world’s leading berry company - to develop AI tools to improve crop phenotyping, better forecast yields, optimize quality inspections, and reduce food waste in the supply chain. Some of the technologies we developed have now been transferred to Driscoll’s and will be integrated into their systems to help achieve their sustainability ambitions. Driscoll’s is the first agribusiness to receive Mineral technology, and is a first step towards ensuring that our breakthrough technologies achieve the greatest impact,” Grant said.
In closing he gave an analogy of the company’s name to the how it can be applied as a verb in the agricultural context:
“In soil science, mineralization is the process by which the nutrients in organic matter are released in a form that makes them available to the plants around them. I think this is a fitting metaphor for the new chapter of Mineral - as our technologies will be mobilized into the agriculture ecosystem, with the goal of making it more sustainable, and more resilient.”
