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.

“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.

The next guest in our Women Leading Visual Tech series is Dr. Sujatha Ramanujan, a serial entrepreneur and seasoned executive with 25 years of experience in medical devices and consumer electronics. She currently serves as the Managing Director of Luminate – the world’s largest accelerator for startups with optics, photonics, and imaging enabled applications. LDV Capital’s Abigail Hunter-Syed spoke with Sujatha about managing a crisis, fear of boredom, and a mission to revitalize the Rochester area.

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.

At last year’s LDV Vision Summit, Dr. Nicholas Harris – Founder & CEO of Lightmatter – gave a keynote speech on the next-generation computing platform they are building for AI and its value for autonomous vehicles in the next 5, 10, 20 years.

Nicholas holds a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his doctoral thesis was on programmable nanophotonics for quantum information processing and artificial intelligence.