Vivid Machines Inc. expands technology from the orchard across the fruit supply chain
An Ontario start-up is on a mission to reduce waste and improve data accuracy in the fruit supply chain. Vivid Machines has automated a task that fruit growers have traditionally done manually, while also improving its timeliness and accuracy.
The company’s Vivid-X vision system uses a real-time spectral sensor and computer vision system mounted onto farm equipment to gather data needed to rapidly and accurately predict fruit size and yield.
Co-founders Jenny Lemieux and Jonanthan Binas first met as participants in the Entrepreneur First program and quickly discovered they had joint interests in information technology, machine learning and food production.
Conversations with growers, agronomists, researchers and staff at both Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs and Vineland Research and Innovation Centre identified a need to improve manual measuring and counting of blossoms, fruitlets and fruit in the orchard, as well as finding a way to detect pests and disease. This led the two entrepreneurs to found Vivid Machines Inc. in 2020. The following spring, they were trialing their first prototype in the orchard.
Today, with a growing staff team, and a $5.8 million CDN seed round just completed, the three-year-old company has quickly become a success story in Canada’s fruit industry.
“In the last two years, we’ve gone from a prototype to a minimal viable commercial product,” says Lemieux, who is also the company’s CEO. “We are really excited about continuing to improve accuracy, starting to build out capabilities around making things more actionable for growers and expanding research into other fruit.”
That’s exactly what $100,000 in non-repayable funding from Bioenterprise Canada’s SmartGrowth program is now helping the company do. SmartGrowth is supported by a Government of Canada investment of over $6 million through the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario).
The Vivid Machine team is just wrapping up a year-long project focusing on developing the system to include additional fruit value chain partners like packhouses, researching how to make predictions from dormant trees and expanding into new fruit crops.
“We are now working to scale our system across the fruit supply chain so that insights gathered from growers can be used by the packhouses and marketing desks that need accurate, timely data when they’re selling to retailers,” explains Tess O’Mara, Director of Partnerships at Vivid Machines. “Our technology can help with early yield prediction months in advance so they know how much fruit of what size and of what variety will be available at what time.”
Currently the system can gather and analyze data from blossom to pre-harvest, and work is now underway to capture information from each tree while it is still dormant and train the models to start making predictions right at the bud stage to help growers with critical pruning decisions early in the growing season.
According to O’Mara, the SmartGrowth funding has been invaluable in helping Vivid Machines advance development of its technology very rapidly. International competitors are working on similar systems, she notes, so speed is of the essence to get a made-in-Canada solution market-ready – the only one currently able to generate results for growers in near real-time.
“This funding from FedDev Ontario has helped us achieve these milestones faster than originally planned and establish this expertise domestically,” O’Mara adds. “As we look ahead to other crops like grapes or cherries, this could also lead to international opportunities for this Canadian innovation.”
Learn more about Vivid Machines
Learn more about Bioenterprise’s SmartGrowth Program
Learn more about FedDev Ontario
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