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Clarifruit’s automated quality control platform funded

Clarifruit, a company developing a software platform for automated quality control for the fruit and vegetable supply chain, is announced the completion of an approximately $12 million USD Series A funding round led by Champel Capital and Firstime Ventures.

“The emerging climate crisis has increased the demand for solutions to conserve food and resources and provide global food security,” said Jonathan Benartzi, partner, Firstime Ventures, in a press release. “Clarifruit has developed a technological solution that significantly and directly reduces produce waste and indirectly enables better use of water, soil and fertilizer resources to benefit all parties.”

Clarifruit was established with the mission of reducing waste in the $2 trillion fresh produce supply chain to secure sufficient food supply for future generations. The company’s solution addresses a key challenge in quality control and decision-making – the lack of standardized and objective quality control processes in assessing the quality of fruits and vegetables. These problems lead to a waste of 45 per cent of the agricultural production in the industry globally, representing approximately $900 billion of loss every year.

The company’s AI-powered quality control platform consists of two elements:

• A mobile app installed on any smartphone that allows quality inspectors to conduct automatic quality control processes in a matter of minutes; and
• A cloud-based control system that allows operation managers to design and manage a monitoring process specific to their company, and to view results according to the requirements of various potential clients and actionable insights in real time.

Clarifruit’s automated quality control platform, leveraging proprietary computer-vision technology and Big Data and analytics capabilities, empowers the world’s growers, retailers, wholesalers and marketing companies to make data-driven business decisions to reduce waste and maximize profitability.

The company currently employs 25 people globally; it plans to scale its sales activity globally, with local offices across North America, Latin America and Europe, and hire a significant number of employees in R&D to increase its AI offerings to the market.

“Since we launched our product 20 months ago, we have been able to make a significant impact and onboard dozens of leading global players into our circle of clients that are now using Clarifruit’s advanced technology to automate their quality control and provide real-time info to reduce waste and maximize revenue opportunities,” said Elad Mardix, co-founder and CEO of Clarifruit, in a press release.

“The market potential is almost infinite because all players in the industry, from the world’s largest retail chains to farmers, currently use manual and outdated quality control methods with limited data to base their decision-making.”