When Valeria Kogan started her PhD program in bioinformatics, the scientific field that uses computation and software to analyze biological data, in 2017, she imagined her career would always be within the fields of mathematics, medicine, or biology. But after the first AI boom in the late 2010s, she got an intriguing opportunity in a sector she hadn't considered: agriculture.
She decided to launch Fermata in 2020. The Tel Aviv-based startup uses computer vision and AI to monitor and diagnose greenhouse crops with diseases or pests. Fermata's software works with any off-the-shelf camera and takes pictures of a greenhouse's crops twice a day. Its in-house AI model analyzes the pictures and sends alerts of infestation or disease to farmers through an app.
For one, she said, they approached the market with genuine curiosity, looking to find out what greenhouse farms needed, as opposed to trying to sell them tech they didn't want.
"The original idea that I had was let's build the robots that will be moving through the greenhouse, and we even built the first project," Kogan said. "We did the first mistake, we built things before talking to anybody, and it still sits in my dad's garage. When we started talking to people, it was very clear that no one needs that, the robot is a bad idea."
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