hyperspectral imaging — LDV Capital Blog on Visual Technologies and AI — LDV Capital
LDV Blog
At LDV Capital's 2026 Annual General Meeting, Principal Ash Cleary outlined how visual technology and AI are driving the next wave of intelligent automation across legacy industries. Moving beyond basic digitization, advances in computer vision, machine perception, robotics, digital twins, and spatial intelligence are enabling autonomous decision-making in logistics, construction, manufacturing, and mining. The article explores trillion-dollar opportunities emerging from these technologies and why visual data is becoming the foundation for the future of industrial infrastructure.
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.
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.
“If the purpose of food is to provide us with nutrition, then shouldn't that be what we're measuring?”.
Sumanta Talukdar, founder and CEO of Gardin, gave a keynote speech at our 7th LDV Vision Summit. Tune in to watch the video or read the transcript and learn how the company leverages a combination of multispectral sensing, data fusion, computer vision, and machine learning to improve food production.
In our latest LDV Insights Report, we examined the opportunities for visual technologies across animal agriculture and found that there is a tremendous opportunity. From meat processing to feed efficiency, animal quality of life and dairy, there are exciting new applications for computer vision and machine learning. Merritt Jenkins, Summer Associate at LDV in 2020, presents some of our findings.