LDV Blog

Our 12th Annual LDV Vision Summit brought together deep tech entrepreneurs, technologists, academics, researchers and investors for engaging discussions on innovations in cutting-edge visual tech and AI. We continue to be excited by the accelerating convergence of visual tech and AI across both the digital and physical worlds.

We were thrilled to welcome speakers from Insight Partners, Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School, Bek Ventures, 01 Advisors, University of Oxford, The Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, and LocalGlobe among others.

A special thank you goes to our speakers and attendees!

Gardin’s Optics-Powered AI Agriculture Platform Increases Greenhouse ROI Across Customers

We are pleased to share an interview with Sumanta Talukdar, CEO & Founder at Gardin and Evan Nisselson.

1. What is Gardin’s mission?
Agriculture is the only foundational industry that doesn’t measure its product accurately and at scale. This has kept a $1T digitization opportunity virtually untapped. Gardin’s mission is to unlock this opportunity by enabling food producers, for the first time, to measure the biology of their crops in real-time and effectively at scale.

2. How is Gardin’s optical phenotyping stack differentiated from alternative sensing or analytics solutions in precision agriculture today?
Gardin is the only solution that delivers on 4 critical requirements simultaneously to greenhouse growers. First, our multimodal robotic optical sensors measure crop photosynthesis in real time and at scale. Second, our Gardin AI brain transforms raw biological signals into clear, actionable insights for growers. Third, the entire platform operates fully autonomously, removing manual data collection and interpretation. Fourth, Gardin is delivered through a scalable SaaS model, aligning our success with our customers’ outcomes.

Since founding in 2012, LDV Capital is a thesis-driven early-stage venture fund investing in people building businesses powered by visual technology and artificial intelligence. Our thesis = a majority of the data our brains analyze is visual. Therefore, the majority of the data artificial intelligence will analyze will also be visual across the light and electromagnetic spectrum.

We invest horizontally across all sectors such as: agriculture, healthcare, nanotechnology, logistics, manufacturing, entertainment, mobility, construction, optics, sensors, life sciences and biotech, robotics, materials science, video, mapping, security and much more.

LDV Capital IV: We are investing out of our 4th fund which was announced in 2024.

We are excited to welcome Ross Cooke to our LDV Capital team. We were impressed by his communication style, problem-solving skills and expertise in nanoscience, physics, chemistry of advanced materials and materials science. Ross is particularly interested in how visual technologies and AI can transform long-established industries where innovation can have an outsized impact, such as healthcare, energy and mining.

We are thrilled to partner with Fieldstone Bio because their microbial sensors can identify targets in the environment at massive scales. Existing methods rely on bulky, expensive equipment and lab processing that takes significant time. Fieldstone Bio's breakthrough enables faster remote sensing using off-the-shelf hyperspectral cameras.

We at LDV Capital participated in their $5M seed round led by Ubiquity Ventures and with participation from E14 Fund.

We are pleased to announce that we have raised our fourth LDV Capital fund with $31M. We will continue investing in the same unique thesis that has not changed since founding LDV Capital in 2012. The majority of data our brains analyze is visual so the majority of data that AI will analyze will be visual as well. Visual data and visual technologies are critical for the success of artificial intelligence horizontally across all sectors.

Last year, we celebrated 10 years of investing in people building businesses powered by visual tech & AI, but it’s just the beginning! Visual technology innovations will continue to be the crux of automation for decades and beyond. Computer vision, machine learning and AI will be the key enablers for innovation in healthcare, precision medicine, manufacturing, construction, agriculture, sustainability, and many more industries.

Which sectors over the next 10 years will have the most societal impact from research advancements leveraging visual technologies and artificial intelligence? In the lead-up to our 9th Annual LDV Vision Summit – the premier global gathering in visual tech – hosted virtually on March 28, we addressed this and 4 other burning questions to 11 brilliant professors & researchers.

Automation is revolutionizing legacy industries from healthcare and precision medicine to manufacturing and construction, to agriculture and sustainability. The adoption of visual technology innovations will continue to remain the crux of automation for the next decade and beyond.

We at LDV Capital have been investing in AI for over 10 years to date, and have made 7 investments in teams building businesses leveraging Generative AI since 2018. We believe that this technology has significant commercial value as a utility that will empower SaaS businesses to disrupt legacy enterprises. Check out this article to learn more and see some examples of exponentially growing commercial applications in content creation, biotech and more.