A little over two years after its debut, Mineral has become its own Alphabet company. Formerly known as the “Computational Agriculture Project” (no bounty for guessing why they chose the new name), the team just graduated from X’s “moonshot” lab.
“After five years of incubating our technology at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, Mineral is now owned by Alphabet,” CEO Elliott Grant said in a blog post. “Our mission is to help expand sustainable agriculture. We help collect, organize and understand previously unknown or misunderstood information about the plant world. We do this by developing platforms and tools that make it useful and practical.”
After years of trying to build a robotics division, mostly through acquisitions, Alphabet looks like it’s growing another organically within the company. After Everyday Robots and Intrinsic, Mineral grew into a fully released Alphabet subsidiary from X.
Mineral uses in-house robots to create datasets and conduct research on various crops. It explains that over the course of its (mostly stealthy) 50-year existence, it has found that most companies have done enough work to gather the necessary range of data to leverage machine learning. I’m here.
“There is no single data collection mode that is suitable for all agricultural operations and crops,” says Grant. “We started with a plant he rover capable of capturing large amounts of high-quality images, and over time it became generalized to work across platforms such as robots, third-party farm equipment, drones, sentinel devices, and mobile phones. We expanded it to the construction of a recognition technology that
The company’s ultimate goal is to create a detailed and rich dataset that can be used by farmers around the world to take advantage of previously unknown growth drivers. In doing so, we hope to help grow crops that are more resilient to climate change without exacerbating immediate problems.
