LDV Blog

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.

We believe that visual technologies will continue to be the crux of advancements in materials science, across nanomaterials and metamaterials, resulting in the transformation of various industrial, medical, and consumer applications. Embedded AI will enable materials to reconfigure themselves autonomously in response to their environment. As sensing abilities and algorithms improve, the full potential of navigating the compositional and configurational possibilities of materials will catalyze widespread transformation for optics, biomarker diagnostics, robotics, 3D printing, and more.

At our 8th Annual LDV Vision Summit, we had the privilege of hosting a fireside chat between LDV's Evan Nisselson and Dr. Martin Varsavsky, an extremely successful serial entrepreneur, professor, and investor who has founded 8 companies (3 with unicorn status) in the US and Europe in the last 30 years.

In the past two years, we hosted a range of virtual events but nothing can replace being in person at our LDV Community gatherings of deep tech entrepreneurs, serial entrepreneurs, researchers, and investors! We are thrilled to share a few photographs from our latest invite-only “Happy Hour” event in NYC.

In the lead-up to our 8th Annual LDV Vision Summit, Evan Nisselson had the privilege of chatting with Amy Kruse, General Partner of Prime Movers Lab. On March 23rd, she will take part in our panel discussion on investing trends in businesses powered by visual technologies.

For far too long, sustainability has been viewed by big companies as more of a marketing campaign or non-profit exercise than a direct financial impact on their bottom line. But the tides are, literally, changing and advances in visual data collection, computer vision, and AI are at a point where climate tech companies can leverage it to build businesses that provide financial benefit to mitigating climate impact.

“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.