AgShift raises US$2 million seed funding from India’s Exfinity Ventures among others to strengthen product development and expand customer reach.

AgShift, a California-based technology startup, is building the world’s first autonomous food inspection system leveraging Deep Learning and Computer Vision, to reduce global food waste. The Company announced today US$2 million in seed funding to strengthen product development and expand customer reach. AgShift is currently working with a select group of food industry leaders to bring this innovative solution to market.

“Current food inspection processes are paper-based and tedious, needing continuous personal training. Inconsistent & subjective inspections result in a loss of $15.6 billion a year for the organizations responsible - not counting the millions of dollars in recovery costs, claim management and loss of brand reputation incurred by the companies involved," said Miku Jha, Founder & CEO of AgShift. “At AgShift, we are re-imagining food inspection at various layers – starting from digitizing product specifications, using a mobile-first approach for operational efficiencies to leveraging Deep Learning to make inspections autonomous. Our goal is to standardize food inspection across the entire supply chain and reduce food wastage resulting from inconsistencies in food quality interpretation.”

AgShift has been founded by Miku Jha, a passionate entrepreneur with a proven track record. She has led multiple startups from founding stage to successful acquisitions & mergers with companies such as IBM and Xyratex. As a product executive, she has launched large scale enterprise products in mobile and internet of things for companies such as VMware and IBM. AgShift’s seasoned core team of Dr. Amitava Bhaduri and Rob O’Rourke bring together a combined experience of 50+ years , blending technology with food expertise across various companies such as Intel and Topco Associates.

AgShift solution blends Deep Learning with Computer Vision to autonomously inspect produce and other commodities for defects. It does quality assessments and makes judgements as per USDA specifications or organizations’ own specifications. The patented deep learning models analyze the defects in the sample images and predict the overall quality of the sample. The platform relies on curated, extensive real-world image data sets to teach our software to analyze defects with high consistency and accuracy – every time. The solution augments manual inspections – providing objective, consistent and standardized quality interpretation across the supply chain – every single time.

“We have just begun to see the capabilities that this technology can bring to the food industry. AgShift can make a huge impact on reducing 1.3 Billion tons of annual food loss and waste - a complex, real world challenge for everyone,” said Miku Jha.

Exfinity Ventures, an early stage venture fund focused on frontier technologies shaping the future, has backed AgShift in their vision. "The AgShift team is truly leading the transition of food inspection and quality assessment into the data-driven era, AgShift’s unique application of deep learning with a challenging proposition truly excites us," said Shailesh Ghorpade, Managing Partner & CIO of Exfinity Ventures.

According to Miku Jha, “We have proven out our core technology working with these great partners. Now, with new capital, we will work towards strengthening our development team and maturing the product for specific enterprise and use cases as we continue to establish AgShift as a standard and platform of choice for autonomous food inspection."

About AgShift 
AgShift Inc., is a deep learning technology start-up working on designing world’s first autonomous food inspection system. AgShift’s software blends patented Deep Learning models with Computer Vsion to make food inspections autonomous, consistent and standardized at scale. AgShift is empowering the world’s largest agriculture and food organizations to reduce global food loss and waste. AgShift Inc. is based out of Silicon Valley, California, and its core team has extensive experience across food and technology industries - with professional tenures at VMware, Intel, IBM and Topco . For more information, visit http://www.AgShift.com.

About Exfinity Ventures 
Exfinity VP is an early-stage frontier technology fund backing enterprise companies (B2B) in India and across the India-USAbusiness corridor. With established connections and ecosystem across India and USA, Exfinity focuses on pioneering Start-ups that are ready to scale across the global stage. Exfinity follows a practitioner driven Investment approach knowing what it takes to build, scale and list technology companies in India and the USA. For more information, visit http://www.exfinityventures.com