News

22 June 2021

Investors Club targets robotic services in agriculture by investing $740K in Israeli agritech Tevel

[Translated with www.DeepL.com]

Turin, June 15, 2021 – Club degli Investitori, one of the most active business angel groups in Italy based in Turin, announces the investment of $740K in Tevel Aerobotics Technologies, an agritech startup founded in 2017 in Israel and active in the segment of precision robotics applied to the agricultural sector.

Specifically, Tevel’s technology consists of a drone system capable of autonomously harvesting fruit from trees (e.g., apples, stone fruits and oranges, etc.) by combining artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, and aeronautical engineering. This technology, covered by several families of international patents, makes it possible to significantly lower the cost of harvesting in specialized orchards.

The investment by the Investors’ Club is part of a $20 million Series B round in which major global players participated, including Kubota, a Japanese multinational agricultural machinery company, and Forbon, a Chinese giant fertilizer producer, as well as other financial investors such as Maverick Ventures Israel, OurCrowd and US-based AgFunder. The capital raised will be allocated to the development of automation technologies for fruit harvesting, with the aim of improving efficiency in agriculture and securing the fruit supply chain.

Among the countries in which Tevel will launch its activities is Italy. It is from here that the startup’s next phase will begin: the collection of fruit from farmers in Bolzano, Piedmont and Emilia-Romagna, in order to evaluate the adoption of self-propelled platforms, and, finally, the industrialization of the final harvesting system. All this before proceeding with extensive cultivation to be planned for the US, South America and Asia markets.

Yaniv Maor, Founder & CEO of Tevel, said: “Tevel aims to solve the great challenge of modern agriculture, the shortage of manpower to harvest fruit, with advanced and flexible robotics systems. We are proud that the “Investors Club” has become a shareholder in our company. This will help us to increase the penetration in the European market. Europe and especially Italy is an important market, which has a great shortage of manpower for fruit picking.”

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