Technology

Ex-Tesla engineer builds Aigen robots to eliminate weeds without pesticides

Published

2 years ago

June 30, 2023

admin

Aigen founders: Rich Wurden (CTO) and Kenny Lee (CEO)

Courtesy: Aigen

The Aigen Element looks like a drafting table on rugged tires. It drives itself continuously at around two miles per hour over farmland, using an advanced computer vision system to identify crops and unwanted botanical invaders.

With two-axis robotic arms positioned close the ground, the Element can flick weeds out of the way where they’ll dry out before they can grow seeds and spread.

The robots, which are used in a fleet sized to meet the needs of a particular growing operation, work continuously for 12 to 14 hours at a time and never need to be plugged in. They are equipped with a lithium iron phosphate battery pack, as well as flexible solar panels which are lighter than the kind typically used on rooftops. They can even run in the dark for about four hours, or six hours in light to moderate rain — all without the emissions associated with diesel-powered farm equipment.

The company behind the robots, Aigen, was founded by Rich Wurden, an ex-Tesla engineer, along with former Proofpoint product lead Kenny Lee in 2020.

According to the most recent data available from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. pesticide usage reached more than 1.1 billion pounds annually by 2012, with herbicides accounting for nearly 60% of that. Glyphosate was the most used active ingredient that year, with 270 million to 290 million pounds used then, and it had been since 2001.

Reducing growers’ over-reliance on pesticides and heavy use of chemicals in the global food supply is of personal importance to Wurden and Lee. Both founders and several employees in their 15-person team have overcome significant health issues associated with exposure to pesticides.

The Aigen Element uses computer vision to spot and eliminate weeds without pesticides.

Courtesy: Aigen

Wurden, who is Aigen’s CTO, comes from a family of farmers who grew sugarbeets in Minnesota. Now, he says, his family’s farm grows sorghum and soy. prod

“My pancreas stopped producing insulin when I was 15 all of a sudden,” he said. He always suspected pesticide exposure, which is associated with a higher risk of diabetes, was a factor.

As a type 1 diabetic, he has lived with an insulin pump and environmental health on his mind every day since his diagnosis.

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Wurden worked as a mechanical engineer and on battery technology at Tesla, helping to create the battery pack that is found in the company’s best-selling Model 3 and Y vehicles and Model S flagship sedan. He later joined an electric boating startup called Pure Watercraft in Seattle, where he says he caught something of the startup bug.

Lee, who is Aigen’s CEO, overcame non-Hodgkins lymphoma as a young man, and says he’s interested in both personal and planetary health following a career in cybersecurity, where he was more focused on making the internet a safer place for all. (Lee was co-founder of Weblife.io, which was acquired by Proofpoint in a deal valued around $60 million in 2017.)

Wurden and Lee met in a Slack channel called Work on Climate where tech industry veterans discussed how to pivot or grow their careers while combating the climate crisis.

Gathering data to analyze pests and water

Farmers want the ability to identify exactly when and where insects are showing up so they can eliminate those that pose a risk, for example. They also want irrigation-related analytics, which would tell them whether their plants are getting enough water, and whether some parts of the field may need more irrigation than others.

Typically, a fleet of the Element robots would pass over the field continuously, gathering data each time. Currently, the system can provide what farmers call a “stand count,” analyzing how many healthy plants are in the field.

The Aigen Element runs on solar and wind power, completely off the power grid. It also runs its analytics and AI-machine learning software on the device, rather than in the cloud. Because of that, Lee said, the company has the potential to give farmers more extensive crop analytics.

“While we’re taking weeding actions, we can do other things that no other agtech can because we’re mobile on the ground.”

Aigen’s farm robots run on solar and wind power, with a lithium iron phosphate battery pack.

Courtesy: Aigen

The Element could also help farmers work around a persistent labor shortage in agriculture, and keep their crops healthy even during extreme heat that would make it hostile for people to stay out in the field weeding.

According to Trent Eidem, who has signed up to put the Aigen Element to work at his sugarbeet growing operation near Fargo, the robots are also appealing because they could reduce the amount of money that growers have to spend on costly “inputs,” namely herbicides. Inputs and energy are his biggest budget items, Eidem said.

In the next year, the company plans to build and bring more of their robots to farmers — and to develop additional capabilities for them, too.

Aigen has raised around $7 million in early-stage funding and additional grant money from the state of Idaho to develop their system.

Investors include a mix of tech and climate-focused seed and venture funds: NEA, Global Founders, Regen Ventures, Bessemer, Climate Tech VC, Cleveland Ave., and a climate fund founded by ex-Meta exec Mike Schroepfer.

NEA Partner Andrew Schoen, who invests in emerging tech, told CNBC that Aigen founders’ track record in both software and hardware and ability to build an “autonomous ground robot” before raising any funding gave him confidence to invest. He also said Aigen is tackling a massive pain point for farmers, representing a potentially massive market.

According to forecasts by Fortune Business Insights, the global market for pesticides, or “crop protection products,” is expected to exceed $80 billion by 2028. Increasingly, the investor believes agricultural producers will include robotics, not just chemical inputs, in their mix.

Technology

Okta shares fall as company declines to give guidance for next fiscal year

Published

2 hours ago

December 2, 2025

admin

Okta shares fall as company declines to give guidance for next fiscal year

Cheng Xin | Getty Images

Okta on Tuesday topped Wall Street’s third-quarter estimates and issued an upbeat outlook, but shares fell as the company did not provide guidance for fiscal 2027.

Shares of the identity management provider fell more than 3% in after-hours trading on Tuesday.

Here’s how the company did versus LSEG estimates:

Earnings per share: 82 cents adjusted vs. 76 cents expected
Revenue: $742 million vs. $730 million expected

Compared to previous third-quarter reports, Okta refrained from offering preliminary guidance for the upcoming fiscal year. Finance chief Brett Tighe cited seasonality in the fourth quarter, and said providing guidance would require “some conservatism.”

Okta released a capability that allows businesses to build AI agents and automate tasks during the third quarter.

CEO Todd McKinnon told CNBC that upside from AI agents haven’t been fully baked into results and could exceed Okta’s core total addressable market over the next five years.

“It’s not in the results yet, but we’re investing, and we’re capitalizing on the opportunity like it will be a big part of the future,” he said in a Tuesday interview.

Revenues increased almost 12% from $665 million in the year-ago period. Net income increased 169% to $43 million, or 24 cents per share, from $16 million, or breakeven, a year ago. Subscription revenues grew 11% to $724 million, ahead of a $715 million estimate.

For the current quarter, the cybersecurity company expects revenues between $748 million and $750 million and adjusted earnings of 84 cents to 85 cents per share. Analysts forecast $738 million in revenues and EPS of 84 cents for the fourth quarter.

Returning performance obligations, or the company’s subscription backlog, rose 17% from a year ago to $4.29 billion and surpassed a $4.17 billion estimate from StreetAccount.

This year has been a blockbuster period for cybersecurity companies, with major acquisition deals from the likes of Palo Alto Networks and Google and a raft of new initial public offerings from the sector.

Okta shares have gained about 4% this year.

WATCH: Earnings will drive small cap outperformance, says Bank of America’s Jill Carey Hall

Technology

Marvell to acquire Celestial AI for as much as $5.5 billion

Published

2 hours ago

December 2, 2025

admin

Marvell to acquire Celestial AI for as much as .5 billion

Marvell Technology Group Ltd. headquarters in Santa Clara, California, on Sept. 6, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Semiconductor company Marvell on Tuesday announced that it will acquire Celestial AI for at least $3.25 billion in cash and stock.

The purchase price could increase to $5.5 billion if Celestial hits revenue milestones, Marvell said.

Marvell shares rose 13% in extended trading Tuesday as the company reported third-quarter earnings that beat expectations and said on the earnings call that it expected data center revenue to rise 25% next year.

The deal is an aggressive move for Marvell to acquire complimentary technology to its semiconductor networking business. The addition of Celestial could enable Marvell to sell more chips and parts to companies that are currently committing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure for AI.

Marvell stock is down 18% so far in 2025 even as semiconductor rivals like Broadcom have seen big valuation increases driven by excitement around artificial intelligence.

Celestial is a startup focused on developing optical interconnect hardware, which it calls a “photonic fabric,” to connect high-performance computers. Celestial was reportedly valued at $2.5 billion in March in a funding round, and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan joined the startup’s board in January.

Optical connections are becoming increasingly important because the most advanced AI systems need those parts tie together dozens or hundreds of chips so they can work as one to train and run the biggest large-language models.

Currently, many AI chip connections are done using copper wires, but newer systems are increasingly using optical connections because they can transfer more data faster and enable physically longer cables. Optical connections also cost more.

“This builds on our technology leadership, broadens our addressable market in scale-up connectivity, and accelerates our roadmap to deliver the industry’s most complete connectivity platform for AI and cloud customers,” Marvell CEO Matt Murphy said in a statement.

Marvell said that the first application of Celestial technology would be to connect a system based on “large XPUs,” which are custom AI chips usually made by the companies investing billions in AI infrastructure.

On Tuesday, the company said that it could even integrate Celestial’s optical technology into custom chips, and based on customer traction, the startup’s technology would soon be integrated into custom AI chips and related parts called switches.

Amazon Web Services Vice President Dave Brown said in a statement that Marvell’s acquisition of Celestial will “help further accelerate optical scale-up innovation for next-generation AI deployments.”

The maximum payout for the deal will be triggered if Celestial can record $2 billion in cumulative revenue by the end of fiscal 2029. The deal is expected to close early next year.

In its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday, Marvell earnings of 76 cents per share on $2.08 billion in sales, versus LSEG expectations of 73 cents on $2.07 billion in sales. Marvell said that it expects fourth-quarter revenue to be $2.2 billion, slightly higher than LSEG’s forecast of $2.18 billion.

WATCH: Nvidia GPUs to Google TPUs: Breaking down all the AI chips