LiDAR — 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.
Every robot, drone, self-driving car, delivery bot, and surgical assistant that claims “intelligence” is fundamentally a product of visual and/or electromagnetic perception systems. The success of Physical AI doesn’t start with neural networks or GPUs – it starts with cameras, sensors, and spectral scanners that give machines their first sense of reality.
Physical AI will not succeed until machines can truly see.
“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.
Peter Stern, CEO of Voyant Photonics, wrote about…basically, the future of everything. See what happens when chip-scale machine perception sensors become affordable enough.
Our second interview in Women Leading Visual Tech series is with Dr. Michal Lipson.
Michal is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University and a member of the National Academy of Science. Her research work is focused on nanophotonics.
Fiona Hua talks about leading the perception team at Boston-based Sea Machines, one of our portfolio companies. Read on to learn about her journey from biometrics to autonomous vessels, how Sea Machines differentiates itself in the market, and more.
Evan Nisselson, General Partner at LDV Capital, interviews Laura Smoliar about her experience investing in visual tech. Laura is a Founding Partner at The Berkeley Catalyst Fund where she focuses on pre-seed and seed-stage companies in biopharma, agriculture, medical device, clean air, clean water, energy storage, and sensors.
Raquel Urtasun is a recipient of the NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award, three Google Faculty Research Awards, and several more. She lectures at the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute and is the head of Uber ATG, Toronto. At our LDV Vision Summit 2017, she spoke about how autonomous vehicles with human perception will make our cities smarter and better to live in.
Manohar Paluri is the Manager of the Computer Vision Group at Facebook. At our LDV Vision Summit 2017, he spoke about how the Applied Machine Learning organization at Facebook is working to understand the billions of media content uploaded every day to Facebook in order to improve people’s experiences on the platform and connect them to the right content.
Leaving his role as founding director of Princeton's Computer Vision and Robotics Lab, Jianxiong Xiao (Professor X) founded AutoX. He spoke at our LDV Vision Summit 2017 about how he is working to lower the price of entry into the autonomous driving field with an innovative camera-first solution.
Anil Cheriyadat, Founder and CEO of Sturfree was a finalist in the ECVC at the 2015 annual LDV Vision Summit. Sturfree technology use mobile cameras to recognize the real world around you then augment it for travel, gaming, entertainment etc. We caught up with Anil as Sturfree prepares to launch its Augmented Reality social application.