KipTraq Introduces “Brandi,” a Powerful New AI Assistant

KipTraq is excited to announce the launch of Brandi, our new AI assistant built directly into the KipTraq platform. Designed to simplify complex workflows, Brandi can instantly summarize thousands of inspections—data, comments, and observations—and deliver a concise, easy‑to‑read briefing in English or Spanish. These summaries can also be automatically emailed to your team on a customized schedule.

Users can guide Brandi with specific prompts, rules, priorities, and goals to ensure each summary highlights the issues that matter most to their operation. The result is clear, actionable insight with no extra effort.

Automated Workflows That Keep Your Operation Moving

KipTraq customers are also seeing major efficiency gains with our new Workflow system, which automates follow‑up tasks based on your defined rules. When an issue is identified—whether it’s in the field, on equipment, or inside a facility—KipTraq automatically assigns the task to the appropriate team members, includes all relevant details, sets a deadline, and sends reminders as needed.

Best of all, this functionality is 100% user‑configurable and works seamlessly both in-field and in‑plant, giving teams flexibility without added complexity.

Learn more at KipTraq.com.

What Customers Are Saying

Nick Martin, Director of Supply Chain for Pacific Trellis Fruit, shared:

“KipTraq gives us the visibility we need to forecast labor, materials, and quality, without adding complexity. We’ve built tools that fit our operation, integrate with our systems, and actually save time and labor. There’s really no limitation to what we can do with it.”

More customer testimonials can be found here.

It’s here! Yes, folks, last week was World Agri-Tech in San Francisco, and so once again that means that the team at AgFunderNews released their annual report Global AgriFoodTech Investment Report 2026, which goes in-depth (as always!) into the funding highlights and analysis of why things changed in 2025 and are likely to continue changing in 2026. I have had the chance to read the report for the first time this week. I will give it a couple more reads in the next few weeks, and I often like to compare the content and context to prior years to see where there are some lessons to be learned across multiple years that you don’t always get from a single year analysis. The AgFunderNews is one of the key pieces of analysis for AgriFoodTech. It’s the AgriFoodTech version of Mary Meeker’s Internet Report, and it’s absolutely must-see TV (or must-read print!).

For today’s article, I wanted to highlight what I believe is the most significant graphic. It’s the classic 10 years of Global Agrifoodtech that now goes from 2016-2025. That graphic is here, and there’s a lot to discuss.

Let’s get right to the most important number: $16.2 billion. That is the total amount of AgriFoodTech VC for 2025. This number tells us a lot about 2025. First, it tells us that while the first half of 2025 was horrendously low in investment capital at $5.1 billion (always worth reminding everyone that the annual number for 2021 was $53B, so $26.5 would be a half year estimate for comparison shopping purposes. Clearly that’s a much different baseline than the $5.1B we saw in the first half of last year), the second half of 2025 got significantly better at $11.1, thus the $16.2B total.

While it is true that in many tech segments the second half (or back half) of the year can be heavier than the front, the first half of 2025 was troubling because coming off the drop from $54.6B in 2021 to $34.9B in 2022 to $17.1B in 2023 to $16.7B in 2024, many of us were of the belief that the small drop from 2023 to 2024 suggested that we had reached the bottom of the trough and things would stabilize. After all, $54.6B to $16.7B represents a 69% drop in three short years, and many of us were hoping to find the bottom sooner than later. But we found no support at all for the alleged new baseline in the 1H2025 number ($5.1B). In fact, you can argue that this is why many were hesitant to put much confidence in a second half resurgence. Things looked pretty grim in July and August of 2025, and $10B seemed like a very real possibility for the 2025 total. So many of us described the forecast for 2025 after the first-half number as $10-12B (to capture a little upside) or $8-12B (to put the $10B as the midpoint of a reasonably large range).

Even worse, to many of us who watch the space closely, as we talked to startups and investors and watched transaction announcements and activity, it did not seem like the second half of 2025 was likely to generate much beyond the first half. On this count, I am very happy to be proven wrong. On all fronts, the $16.2B total for 2025 is actually a big win. Being able to use a $15-17B or $16-18B range as your total AgriFoodTech VC funding amount for 2025 (depending on how conservative you want to be) is a lot better than $8-12B or even $10-12B.

The other point to remember for AgriFoodTech VC at a high level is that we’ve gotten rid of a lot of capital from two of the dumpster fires of 2021 (vertical farming/CEA and alternative proteins – 42% of that $54B number and none of it ended well) and now (for the moment) stabilized in the $15-17B range. Every dollar that those two categories have been reduced by de-risks the AgriFoodTech VC segment as a whole and thankfully there have been billions of dollars in reductions. I see much less risk in vertical farming today than I did even two years ago.

I still have some concerns about the alt-protein category, but that’s a topic for another day. For now, it’s worth noting that of those two dumpster fires, alt-protein is by far the one with the most smoke still lingering around and therefore the higher risk factor of the two, but it’s a lot less risk than just a few short years ago.

So, we have a much healthier baseline for AgriFoodTech VC than we did just six months ago ($16.2B v $10B), and we have de-risked two of the riskiest segments and 42% of the whole category from five years ago. Time will tell if we can maintain the new range of $15-17B (to be conservative). Our first two data points will be the Q1 and H1 checkpoints at the end of Q1 and Q2 this year.

With the significance of the overall total discussed, let’s take a look at the main category related to California grower economic challenges: labor. Second, when we dive into the automation segment specifically, recall that earlier I posted that automation is averaging 4-7% of total AgriFoodTech investing and trending up (currently at about 6%). If you take 6% of $10B (the estimate I was using for 2025 until actual numbers landed), you get $600M as the annual investment in automation. That was the number I’ve been using, and obviously if you baseline five years of investment and don’t see much cause for big increases (because growth in AgriFoodTech VC is unlikely to happen until exits, either IPOs or M&A, picks up in a meaningful way), you can straight-line the numbers to $50B in AgriFoodTech VC over five years and $3B (6%) as the target for automation/robotics. That was the number I’ve been using as a five-year automation investment target for a few months.

Now that the real number has landed at $16.2B and the real number (which will be in a graphic further down) for automation for 2025 was $900 million, you see two things. We are well above the $10B target (as above – 62% above) I’ve been using for AgriFoodTech and (as importantly, particularly for robotics startups) well above the $600M target for automation (in fact we are 50% above it). As importantly, if you take $900M as the automation spend out of $16.2B, you see that last year automation was at 5.6% of total. This provides support for the 6% baseline I used for the five-year projection.

And here we get to the fun with spreadsheets portion of the article, and who doesn’t like to see some fun with spreadsheets in an AgTech article? I went through a couple of modeling exercises and played them all the way out. In the spreadsheet below, you can see that I took the old 2025 forecast (when all we had was first half of 2025 data) and compared it to actual in the first two columns, then ran the numbers out straight-line as a baseline for a five-year projected total. Then I took four different scenarios that used different amounts of overall AgriFoodTech VC funding and the percentage of that funding that was in the automation category. The four scenarios I used for total AgriFoodTech VC were $14B, $15B, $16B, and $17B. The four scenarios I used for automation were 4%, 5%, 6%, and 7%. You can see the details here.

Based on the actual data we now have from 2025, I believe the most likely baseline (i.e. which one of the four is most likely to be closest to both numbers) is the third column, which uses $16B and 6%. Recall that the actual numbers for 2025 turned out to be $16.2B and 5.6%. I think the $16B number represents a fair annual baseline because a lot of the poorly performing segment capital has gone away and is not likely to suffer an additional large drop. I think the 6% number represents a fair automation percentage baseline because automation is the category that is most closely aligned to solving specialty crop grower’s primary challenge – labor and the cost and availability of it. I think it will continue to grab share from categories that are less clear about the grower problems they are solving or even less clear about the grower economics they need to reach to become a solution growers purchase. You can see the range of outcomes in the four models when you focus on the five-year forecast numbers for each of the models. There is a range of $1.7B lower in the first model to $1.5B higher in the last model.

Recall that I posted a couple weeks back on the shifting investment landscape as we went from 78% funding for seed to A round investments 10 years ago and 22% funding for B round and later to an exact flip today. Today, we have 78% going to B round and later and 22% going to seed to A round. There are multiple reasons for this, the primary one being that a lot of VCs are choosing portfolio protection over new investments and choosing to double down on existing investments with new rounds at a much higher rate (78%), which leaves much less capital for early stage first time investments (22%).

I outlined in that piece that we now have a $1B shortfall in funding needed for a healthy automation innovation funnel because of this shift. The reason to continue watching the capital shift by stage is to provide further support and more data for the argument. One of the more likely sources of capital that can help close the $1B shortfall is federal or state funding from DC and Sacramento based on an economic development thesis because of all the jobs agriculture and AgTech create and support in rural economies. The economic development skews heavily toward rural job creation and minority job creation and job up-skilling.

We will continue watching the overall AgriFoodTech VC number, the automation number, and the shift-mix from seed to A to B and later with an eye on helping both DC and Sacramento remember that ag and AgTech work closely together to support ag GDP and jobs, AgTech GDP and jobs – particularly in automation. The ag and AgTech then create additional opportunities for things like automation integration (integrating the robots into farming operations after they are sold and need to be supported) and data/analytics solutions, as well as circular economy GDP and jobs created from the opportunity that hundreds of thousands of acres of permanent crops (trees and vines) and 6,000 ag and food processing facilities creates around reuse and recycle of both of those product sets into things like new ingredients and new jobs and GDP.

For today, the key points from the most important graphic of the AgFunderNews annual report are these:

1)          $16.2B is a great total for 2025 AgriFoodTech total VC investments given the risk factors and concerns many of us had just six months ago. Ideally, this total represents a new baseline range that AgriFoodTech VC can maintain. We will know as the quarterly actual numbers land each quarter of 2026.

2)          $900M is a solid total for automation and keeps its percentage of AgriFoodTech VC spending at 5.6%. I expect automation to continue to gain share of investment because it’s solving real problems related to labor availability and cost.

3)          The four scenarios I modeled with AgriFoodTech annual investment at $14B, $15B, $16B, and $17B, and the % on automation at 4%, 5%, 6%, and 7% create a wide range of 5-year automation investment totals (from $1.7B below baseline to $1.5B above baseline). These scenarios are important because they allow us to adjust in real time as new data arrives and as we make fundraising requests and measure the economic development impact of capital from all sources.

4)          At this point, the most likely baseline scenario for 2026-2030 for automation VC investment is $4.8B, which models AgriFoodTech VC at $16B a year (up from $10B a year previously) and models automation investment at $960M a year (up from $600M a year previously). In the most likely scenario, the model suggests $1.1B for seed to A round investments over five years and $3.7B for B round and later investments over five years. All of these numbers are well above the former model, which is good news for startup founders. Now we watch and see how 2026 plays out and if we need to make additional model adjustments.

Last Monday marked a milestone moment for the Western fresh produce ecosystem with the grand opening of Reservoir Farms in Salinas. This new commercial-scale site isn’t just another operation breaking ground; it’s an inflection point for the future of agricultural innovation. For years, both innovators and growers have pointed to the gap between early stage development and real‑world commercial testing. Reservoir Farms is designed to close that gap, and its opening signals a major acceleration point for AgTech across the Western U.S.

Why This Matters for Innovators

For AgTech startups and established innovators alike, Reservoir Farms creates something the industry has been missing for far too long:
A true commercial farm environment where technology can be tested, iterated, refined, and validated on real crops, in real conditions, on real timelines.

Historically, innovators have been forced into a slow and often uncertain process: waiting months to run a single trial, relying on fragmented access to fields, or depending on grower goodwill and sporadic availability. Reservoir Farms solves this problem by providing consistent access to commercial acreage, the farm enables companies to:

• Test ideas earlier and more often
• Identify failure points quickly
• Perfect their products before approaching growers
• Cut down burn rate and reduce costly delays
• Accelerate time to market

It’s the kind of testbed Silicon Valley startups take for granted—but until now, the fresh produce sector lacked.

Why This Matters for Growers

Growers have carried an enormous burden in the AgTech journey. Every new technology requires time, attention, and operational disruption. With dozens of startups knocking each season, trial fatigue has become a real and growing challenge.

Reservoir Farms gives growers something new:
A place to see, evaluate, and compare emerging technologies without committing labor, land, or downtime on their own operations.

Instead of hosting ten different companies, growers can visit one centralized location and

• See technology running in real conditions
• Compare solutions side‑by‑side
• Evaluate performance objectively
• Decide what fits their operation before engaging

This isn’t just more efficient, it protects valuable time and ensures growers only adopt the tools that truly deliver.

Why I’m Personally Excited

My excitement for Reservoir Farms is deeply tied to my own experience. When I was part of developing what ultimately became the Stout Smart Cultivator, I had access to internal farms that accelerated our progress dramatically. We could test constantly, iterate rapidly, and generate real-world data at a pace that simply wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

When I left Stout in 2021, it became immediately clear how rare that kind of access was. Most AgTech companies were operating without it, and the consequences showed. Slower iteration. Higher burn. Longer time to market. Less successful commercialization.

Reservoir Farms changes that. Now, any agtech company—large or small—can access the same advantages I once had. And ultimately, that’s the biggest win for growers: stronger companies, better products, and solutions that reach the field faster and more reliably.

Western Growers’ Commitment

To demonstrate how critical we believe this initiative is, Western Growers is committing a seven‑figure sponsorship to Reservoir Farms. Our board has been clear: “This technology needs to happen faster.” This financial commitment sends a strong signal to our membership—we are fully invested in helping solve their biggest challenges, and we’re putting real resources behind that commitment.

Reservoir Farms is more than a new facility. It’s a catalyst for the next generation of agricultural technology and a major step toward a faster, more collaborative, more effective commercialization pipeline.

And this is only the beginning.

The WG Innovation team would like to offer a new front door for AgTech startups that want to talk to Western Growers members. I am excited to share the release of the new page that our partners at Plug and Play have put together:

Western Growers Association | Startup Intake Form

The Startup Intake Form is easy to complete. When you click through to the page, you press Start and it’s very similar to what you fill out when submitting an Accelerator or Incubator application process. This should not be a surprise because Plug and Play is one of the world’s largest Accelerators, and this is far from their first rodeo – just their most recent.

You enter your company name, your company URL, the region you are operating in, the year you launched your startup, how many full-time and part-time team members you have, total funding to date, annual revenue, the role of the main point of contact, your name, and your latest Pitch Deck or one-pager. Then you fill in your traction data – what segment you are in (automation, etc), what crop you are strongest in, what stage you are in (prototype, pilot, commercial or scaling), type of product you are selling (hardware, software, both, service), top value propositions for growers to consider your solution (labor solution, compliance solution, water efficiency solution), where you can deploy within 90 days (what region), what you need from Western Growers (introduction, pilot partner, or channel partner), and your biggest pilot dependency.

Next, you provide some data on your solution: how growers will justify buying your technology, your ROI / payback time (with data from growers), what stops adoption on farms (even with tech that works), how you approach commercialization, number of grower/shipper interviews you’ve done in the last 6 months, and you’re done. The whole process should take 5-10 minutes. The page says five. That might be optimistic, but I completed it twice and didn’t rush, and ten minutes is definitely a fair expectation. This is particularly true if you’re a founder who knows your startup and your metrics (which are certainly most or all of you).

So why did we launch this process with Plug and Play? It’s simple. We needed a way to scale the front door to grower conversations for startups in our two key areas – labor challenges (and automation provides the best and most scalable solutions) and chemical input challenges (and the portfolio of bio-controls, genetics, and regenerative agriculture practices provide the best alternatives to pesticides that are increasingly under pressure of having usage limits or outright bans from both state and federal regulators as well as retail buyers). Our friends at Mixing Bowl identified over 700 automation startups two years ago, and there have been additional startups funded since then. In biologicals alone, they have identified 1,300 funded startups with over 400 in the bio-controls segment in 2025 (and as with automation more have received funding since the Landscape was published). To be clear, these are the ones that earned a spot on the Crop Robotics Landscape, Biologicals Landscape, and Bio-Controls Landscape after some vetting work by Mixing Bowl. There are more startups. This is just the relative short list to focus on.

We have 2,000 startups, and increasingly they are all over the globe. Well, Ben Palone and I are only two people, and we have some budget and time constraints that prevent us from going all over the world to do scouting activity. In fact, we have plenty to do right here in California and the western region of the US. So how do you take the 700 automation startups plus the additional ones that got funding and the 1,300 biological startups (and additional ones that got funding) and manage the 2,000+ startups into an innovation funnel that winnows itself down to a manageable count of “commercial ready” or more importantly “grower economics ready” prospects?

First, you look at the potential players that could help with global scouting activity. There are several Accelerators that get hundreds of applicants for AgTech and AgriFoodTech programs. There are Accelerators that focus on early stage technology efforts in key tech segments like AI, fintech, and mobile apps. Then we looked at a Venn diagram of the overlap between those two groups, and things thinned out pretty quickly (just like you would expect with a quality thinning robot – see what I did there?) We were looking for a partner with a global footprint that could help us scout startups all over the world and interact with the WG team and WG members regularly about what and who they’re seeing with a good understanding of grower needs and how well they are being met as related to the quality of solutions they are evaluating.

Once we reviewed the choices, it was pretty clear that Plug and Play provided a unique combination of global capabilities and a solid understanding of grower challenges and evaluating potential solutions. With that in mind, we signed a three-year partnership with them last year focused on automation scouting globally as a key deliverable. The first step was opening up communications between Plug and Play and WG membership. This effort began in earnest at the WG Annual Meeting last November, which four members of the Plug and Play team were able to attend. The next step was to build the landing page at the URL above and begin promoting it. Startups should see this as the first step in a multi-step funnel toward engaging with WG members.

We (the WG Innovation team) think this is a big step forward for startups, for Plug and Play, and for Western Growers. Startups now have a clear starting point because Ben and I were getting somewhat overwhelmed by the volume of in-bound conversations, and it forced us to do less travel and scouting. Every early stage startup conversation we had took time away from one of our big focus areas: helping startups that are already at midfield get into the red zone and ideally into the end zone (i.e. commercial success at a scale that achieves cash flow positive status. At this point, the startup’s future is much more secure and they do not need to raise additional capital). In a capital constrained environment, helping later stage companies get to commercial scale needs to be a priority to maximize the chances of developing more automation solutions. But early stage startups need help too – in many cases even more than later stage startups until they are able to achieve the highly desirable product-market fit where the value proposition hits the grower right where they are and at grower economics that allow the grower to buy the solution and deliver an ROI timeframe of less than two years. Ben and I were barely bringing a knife to a gun fight.

So back to the form – submit your information via the form and the Plug and Play team will review the information, and in many cases, will confirm key data points during their evaluation. Then the rest of the funnel starts to take shape. And before we go any further, we want to recommend and highly encourage the founder (or co-founder) or CEO (and ideally and often those are the same person) complete the data because you should have the most comprehensive picture of the information needed to complete the form. Don’t leave that to someone else. Once you are vetted, Plug and Play will work with Ben and me to determine the right set of scouted startups to put in front of WG membership in a webinar (i.e. yep, another Zoom call for growers!).

The webinars will likely be quarterly, and the first few will focus heavily on automation solutions. The Plug and Play team will present an overview of each solution in terms of the product (the tech), the team (with particular focus on ownership of the revenue target and the product roadmap – the two functions that matter the most for AgTech startups), and the go-to market strategy (which markets are they in, what are the plans for US market entry for international startups). The evaluation is about a lot more than just the R&D work to get to a first version of the product. Technology Readiness Level (TRL) is a common metric cited as a measurement of product capabilities, but it is only part of the entire package that needs to work with grower organizations. And for AgTech, it is always worth mentioning that the all-important last mile is the actual integration of the solution into the grower operations team and the integration of a new robot into a farming operation team is one of the more complex integrations out there because it requires both the tech and the teams to get integrated in a way that delivers the targeted economic results and ROI.

I’ve worked in startups in e-commerce, search marketing, and enterprise data centers. AgTech has by a fairly wide margin the most complex requirements for successful and sustainable integration because it has the largest set of (literally) outside-the-building risks relative to the ones I mentioned above. Startups need to invest in it to be successful, and Plug and Play will be looking to evaluate the integration capabilities.

Those are the first couple of steps startups should take. Submit the form to get into Plug and Play’s evaluation list. Then once you are evaluated by Plug and Play, the vetted solutions will get presented to WG members via multiple channels (in addition to the webinar, we will promote the vetted startups in both WG Member publications and emails to raise awareness of them among WG members). Our goal is to put vetted startups in front of members on a regular basis through channels they already use to create as many opportunities as possible for grower-startup conversations with vetted startups. It is important to remember that the WG Innovation team does not own your startup’s revenue number, but we are happy to help tee up funnel opportunities when it makes sense. Usually, one time where it makes a lot of sense is after the vetting process. We are doing things this way to really provide an incentive for every startup to complete the form. That puts everyone on a level playing field and lets Plug and Play review all of them during vetting.

We will provide more details of the rest of the engagement points on the way to a very happy day for some startups. That day is when you’ve gone through a Reservoir Farms membership (or something like it) and technology evaluation (which is different than Plug and Plays evaluation for reasons that will become obvious once we define it in a future article) or something comparable, completed numerous field demonstrations and field trials, and finally earned the right to be published in a Western Growers Case Study with detailed grower economics and an Economic Template so other growers can do their own math of how the solution economics work for them (different farmers use different equipment ownership/leasing processes, different labor types – H-2A v domestic, and different employment options – through a farm labor contractor (FLC) or direct hire; together all of these factors can make the ROI math very different for two growers of similar crop sets). But all of that is a topic and an article for a different day. For now, we would like to invite folks to share the form widely and make sure the startups they are working with, investing in, and supporting all know that there is a new front door to WG members, and it’s available for everyone!

We are excited to share that Monday was the Grand Opening for Reservoir Farms first location in Salinas. There were over 300 RSVPs as of last Friday and I am writing this before driving down for the Grand Opening, so we expect several hundred people to come by and support the launch. Salinas Mayor Dennis Donohue and Western Growers President and CEO Dave Puglia will be joining the event for keynote remarks.

The Grand Opening is a big milestone for Salinas Valley agriculture and AgTech. Growers will now have a place that provides startups with commercially grown acreage across the key crops that make Salinas Valley, including leafy greens, strawberries, and many others that the growers and startups will specify. Reservoir Farms has been working closely with my Western Growers colleague Ben Palone and I for over two years to help make the Grand Opening a reality. What WG members want more than anything is successful startups who can prove their products work and that they work in a way that improves grower economics, often around labor costs. Reservoir Farms helps by providing both the acreage and the technology validation stages needed to make sure products work as advertised. Big thanks to Naturipe and Tanimura & Antle for providing the growing work to make sure the acreage is built right so that growers and startups can trust it.

Startups also get several huge benefits. At launch, there will be 12 paying members startups at Reservoir Farms. They will get shared R&D space, shared acreage (as mentioned, commercially grown), shared equipment (huge thanks to our friends at John Deere for providing some nice looking green tractors!), and shared office space at both the Reservoir Farms location and the WG Center for Innovation and Technology downtown. This will save the startups significant amounts of time and money as they build and get ready to commercialize their technology solutions. Many of the original solutions are for automation, so you can expect to see a lot of robots and drones in the ground and in the air just west of Salinas off highway 68. They will be testing regularly. There will be regular field demonstrations. There will be meetings to get feedback from growers on what’s working and what needs some more work. Ideally, Reservoir Farms helps some startups save enough time and money that they are able to get to commercialization faster and with less capital required. If more startups are making it through to commercialization, that is a win for the startups, WG members, and Reservoir Farms.

Monday was two years in the making but represents a huge step forward for Salinas. In addition to Salinas, Reservoir Farms is hard at work on two additional locations – Merced and Sonoma. By the end of 2026, all three locations will be open and serving Reservoir Farms startup members with support from WG members. Startups will be able to choose the right location for their solution based on the crops and growers they are building their solutions for, so look for more news to come. It has taken a great mix of public and private funding to get Reservoir Farms to this point, and Western Growers is in active discussions on the right way to increase our commitment and deepen the partnership.