Elad Levy, one of the founders and former CEO of Roboteam, which recently merged with the Psagot investment firm, has founded a new startup in the agriculture and climate sector. The new company, agRE.tech, has closed a pre-seed funding round of around $2 million from leading companies such as Israel’s Zemach and French energy giant EDF.
For the past year, agRE.tech has been working on developing a robot operating system for agricultural power generation areas. The system is attached to solar power infrastructure and uses artificial intelligence to enable robotic operations in the agricultural space. These operations include precision spraying, pruning, automatic harvesting, as well as automated control and maintenance of solar power fields.
“We wondered how we could combine our robotics expertise with Zemac’s agricultural sector,” says Levy, CEO of the new company. “We realized there was an opportunity to support agriculture without interfering with it. What is preventing this sector from developing are agricultural regulations that are feared to have a negative impact on agriculture, and there is less capital input than in the solar sector. Our system adds significant value by combining robotics and artificial intelligence to perform precise movements. We signed a contract with EDF to promote the solar sector.”
“We have established a half-dunham vineyard in the north that combines robotics and agriculture,” Levy said. “We are exploring a 100-dunham project that would integrate the whole system, and once we have proven our capabilities, we plan to expand to many more vineyards.”
Last month, investment firm Psagot signed a merger agreement with Roboteam, a manufacturer of remotely controlled robots for intelligence gathering. Psagot purchased all of Roboteam’s shares and allocated 56.3% of Psagot’s shares to Roboteam’s current shareholders. The deal is valued at approximately $40 million (approximately NIS 150 million). Levy, a Roboteam shareholder, will also own shares in the combined company.
“We think this is a great merger,” said Levy, who founded Roboteam and served as CEO for 12 years. “The security space is very hot and will remain so for the next few years. We recently won important tenders with the Marines and the U.S. Air Force. Our systems are mature and have been in development for over a decade. We see not only the current value of the company, but also the future potential. No one is considering exiting right now. We believe there will be a big jump in the near future.”
