Alphabet scales back minerals business, but says technology “lives on”

Google's parent company Alphabet is winding down AI-powered agricultural intelligence startup Mineral and switching to a licensing model just a year after it came out of stealth.

Incubated at Alphabets' moonshot tech lab X, Mineral promises to officially debut in January 2023, providing the foundational technology to help other companies get up to speed by combining data from camera-equipped unmanned rovers that travel through farmland with large-scale, multi-modal, unstructured data on global agriculture from satellite imagery, farm equipment and public databases. Initial partners included berry giant Driscoll's, crop inputs giant Syngenta and global food security group CGIAR.

In an interview with AgFunderNews at the time, CEO Elliot Grant said the company develops machine learning models to help agricultural companies predict crop yields, increase production, control pests and weeds, reduce waste, minimize chemical and water use, and reduce agriculture's impact on the planet.

In a statement posted on Mineral's website today about the company's new business model, first reported by Bloomberg, Grant said Mineral will now license its technology to partners such as berry grower Driscoll's.

We've previously said that we are exploring new and innovative partnerships that can help us go beyond our traditional approaches. As a result, earlier this year we decided to rethink Minerals' structure and our approach to ensure we have a positive impact on as many farmers as possible. Minerals will no longer be an Alphabet company, and our technology will continue to live within large agricultural companies where it can have the greatest impact.

He added: “We've worked with our partners from day one. We've developed robots that can inspect every plant in the field. We've applied the latest breakthroughs in AI and generative AI to help our partners address the urgent challenges of reducing food waste, improving predictions and collecting higher quality data.”

According to Grant, Mineral has worked closely with Driscoll's to develop AI tools that will improve crop phenotyping, better predict yields, optimize quality inspections and reduce food waste in the supply chain. Some of the technology that Mineral has developed is now being transferred to Driscoll's and will be integrated into their systems to help achieve their sustainability goals.

Mineral employees had been searching for months for ways to keep their jobs after it became clear the company had no future within Alphabet, Bloomberg reported. The company had forged partnerships with major food and agriculture companies but had struggled to turn those deals into permanent revenue streams, the paper reported, citing anonymous sources.

We'll be announcing more in the future…

Head of marketing Megan Fallon told AgFunderNews that additional announcements about partnerships with other leading innovators will be made in the coming days, but that she could not comment further at this stage.

She noted that the technology available for licensing is software and the company's AI technology, not hardware, and that while the drones will not be sent to Driscoll's, they are proving to be extremely valuable to the partnership from a data collection standpoint.

She did not say how many people at Mineral were being laid off, but said “a lot of people at Mineral are very passionate about leveraging technology to drive a more innovative agricultural ecosystem, and we are committed to hiring them.” [new positions]Both within the alphabet system and within the agricultural business.

She added: “All I can say is that I'm very excited about how some of our technologies are performing, and I believe in many ways we are achieving our mission of making the biggest impact possible for farmers.”

Sources 1/ https://Google.com/ 2/ https://agfundernews.com/mineral-winds-down-we-will-no-longer-be-an-alphabet-company-but-our-technology-will-live-on The mention sources can contact us to remove/changing this article

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