New AgriTech startup wants to blend solar power and smart farming

Elad Levy, one of the founders and former CEO of Roboteam, which recently merged with the Psagot investment House, has established a new startup in the field of agriculture and climate. The new company, agRE.tech, has completed a pre-seed funding round of about $2 million from major entities, including Israel's Zemach and the French energy giant EDF.

agRE.tech has been working over the past year on developing a robotic operating system for agrovoltaic areas. The system latches onto the photovoltaic infrastructure, using artificial intelligence to enable robotic operations in the agricultural space. These operations include precise spraying, pruning, autonomous picking, and more, alongside automatic control and maintenance of the solar fields.

Elad Levy.

"We thought about how we could connect our expertise in robotics with the agricultural field of the Zemach company," said Levy, who serves as CEO of the new company. "We realized there is an opportunity to help agriculture without interfering with it. What prevents the deployment of such fields is agricultural regulation that fears harming agriculture, which brings in less capital than photovoltaic fields. Our system brings significant added value by combining robotics and artificial intelligence to perform precise actions. We signed with EDF to promote the solar side."

"We established a half-dunam vineyard field in the north of the country that combines robotics and agriculture," noted Levy. "We are looking for a 100-dunam project to integrate our entire system, and when we prove its ability, we will scale it to many fields."

Last month, Psagot investment house signed a merger deal with Roboteam, which produces remotely operated robots for intelligence gathering. Psagot purchased the full shares of Roboteam and allocated 56.3% of Psagot shares to the current shareholders of Roboteam, valuing the deal at approximately $40 million (about NIS 150 million). Levy, a shareholder in Roboteam, thus also owns a share in the merged company.

"I think it's an amazing merger," said Levy, who founded Roboteam and served as its CEO for 12 years. "The security field is very hot and that won't change in the coming years. We recently won a significant tender with the Marines and the US Air Force. Our systems are mature and have gone through more than a decade of development. We look ahead at the company's potential, not just its current value. No one is looking for an exit now; we believe there will be a huge breakthrough soon."