Beginnings
Blue River began as an idea hatched by two Stanford graduate students: Jorge, former head of precision agriculture at Trimble Navigation, and Lee, a PhD student and roboticist. While taking Steve Blank's Lean LaunchPad course, Jorge and Lee had a wild ambition: to make farming more sustainable through robotics and computer vision.
During the course, the team built and tested its first prototype in California's ripe Central Valley - successfully demonstrating a computer that could recognize distinct plants. With seed funding from several professors, including Blank, and an NSF SBIR grant, Jorge and Lee took the leap and incorporated. They named their venture Blue River Technology - capturing the spirit of the sustainable, dynamic, ever-advancing company they wanted to build.
Technology
We're believers that cutting-edge technical fields such as computer vision, machine learning and robotics can transform agriculture just as it has so many other industries. These technologies will unlock a farm of the future where machines can identify and care for each individual plant, making the farmer more profitable while drastically reducing the required chemical inputs.
Solutions that work
From the beginning, Blue River has been a company focused on our customers. We start with problems farmers are facing today, and deliver rugged machines that are field-ready.