The next big test for AI isn’t happening in a data center. It’s happening in the dirt.

Really, it’s in the weeds.

Two Seattle-area startups are betting that AI can transform how farmers find and eliminate unwanted plants — one by mapping every weed, the other by zapping them with lasers.

Issaquah, Wash.-based TerraClear is commercializing a new system that uses ultra-high-resolution imagery and machine learning to map individual weeds across entire fields of corn and soybeans, then turns those detections into digital prescriptions that can be sent directly to precision sprayers.

The new Weed Maps technology from TerraClear — best known for its robotic rock picking technology — can identify weeds as small as a quarter of an inch, the company said in a press release today.

Meanwhile, Seattle-based Carbon Robotics is taking a different approach: Its autonomous LaserWeeder uses computer vision to identify weeds and then blasts them with lasers.

Now, the AI powering these systems is getting smarter, too — moving beyond simple weed detection toward models that can recognize and understand plants across different crops, fields and growing conditions.

TerraClear’s new Weed Maps, announced Tuesday, captures imagery at 1.5-millimeter resolution and identifies weeds as small as the eraser on a pencil. Rather than sampling portions of a field, the company says it collects images of every acre and produces a geo-referenced map that can be uploaded to section or nozzle-controlled sprayers used by farmers.

The goal is precision at a level that would be difficult for a human to achieve, allowing a farmer to know where the individual weeds are.

TerraClear says the maps can be delivered the next day, giving growers a chance to act while weeds are still small and easier to control.

Devin Lammers, the chief executive of TerraClear, tells GeekWire that its approach “sidesteps the capital problem entirely.” In other words, farmers need not buy a new piece of expensive equipment, instead using software to turn existing sprayers into precision instruments by telling them exactly where to spray.

He called Carbon Robotics laser-weeding system “impressive technology,” noting that it works well for specialty crops and organics.

But bigger farms producing commodity crops like corn and soybeans — the market TerraClear is going after — need a different approach, he said.

“Modern grain and oilseed sprayers already have individual nozzle control and RTK positioning — the actuation hardware is sitting in the shed,” Lammers said via email. “We just hand the sprayer a shapefile of individual weed locations and it turns the nozzle on only where a weed actually is.”

Given that large corn and soybean growers farm more acres at a lower revenue per acre, Lammers said it’s a “very different P&L” where expensive new equipment needs to pencil out.

With TerraClear’s new system, Lammers added that “the farmer buys a map, not a machine.”

RFK Jr. and new ways to farm

One of the benefits of both approaches is chemical use reduction in the field, a hot topic in political circles with President Trump earlier this year committing $1 billion to modernize farming and reduce chemicals in agriculture. That federal investment could help spark new innovations, like the ones TerraClear and Carbon Robotics are developing.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. secretary of health and human services, earlier this year touted Carbon Robotics’s machines on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience as a possible solution in cutting pesticide use.

In the case of TerraClear, Lammers said the precision mapping technology alone could cut pesticide and herbicide use by up to 80% with no loss of efficacy.

Both startups are part of a broader Pacific Northwest ag-tech ecosystem that has been applying AI and robotics to agriculture, building on the regions farming and tech roots.

TerraClear founder Brent Frei represents that unique farming and tech DNA. He grew up on a family farm in Grangeville, Idaho, before studying at Dartmouth and then moving to the Seattle area where he co-founded Onyx Software and Smartsheet.

Founded in 2017, TerraClear originally attacked a much less glamorous agricultural problem: identifying and removing rocks from farmers’ fields. In 2024, the company raised $15 million, bringing its total funding to $53 million.

By February of this year, TerraClear had expanded to about 50 employees and was approaching 1,000 customers. At that time, it also launched an autonomous field robot called TerraScout, designed to collect high-resolution imagery across a field and convert that information into actionable maps for existing farm equipment.

The company says TerraScout can collect more than 4 billion image samples per acre and map more than 1,000 acres a day under favorable conditions.

In addition to TerraScout, Lammers said they are using aerial drones to ingest field-level data into its new Weed Maps product.

“That’s the part that compounds — the imagery we gather is field-level, repeated season over season, and specific to the commodity acre,” Lammers said. “Models get better, which makes the maps better, which brings more acres, which produces more data.”

Carbon Robotics is further down the road in making the machine the decision-maker, and eradicating weeds without the use of chemicals.

The Seattle startup’s LaserWeeder combines cameras, AI and high-powered lasers to identify weeds and destroy them without applying herbicides or pesticides. The company has deployed its machines on farms around the world and has built an enormous dataset in the process.

Announced in February, its so-called Large Plant Model was trained on 150 million labeled plants, which Carbon describes as the largest agricultural plant dataset of its kind. The company’s goal is to move beyond narrowly trained computer-vision systems that need to be retrained whenever a new weed or field condition appears.

With the Large Plant Model, farmers can use Carbon’s Plant Profiles feature to show the system a handful of images and customize what the machine should recognize and target.

Given the changing dynamics of a weed during various stages of its growth — and based on conditions such as soil, weather and crop varieties — Carbon wants to correctly identify the difference between a weed and a crop.

“When our robots can understand any plant in any field immediately and adapt behavior in real-time, farmers immediately get maximum value from the machines,” Carbon Robotics CEO Paul Mikesell said in a press release. “The Large Plant Model provides farmers with the most advanced AI technology to maximize the weeding quality of LaserWeeder in their unique environments.”

Founded in 2018, Carbon Robotics has raised $177 million to date and as of last year employed about 260 people at offices in Seattle and a manufacturing facility in Richland, Wash.

The farm becomes a giant AI dataset

TerraClear and Carbon Robotics are attacking one of agriculture’s thorniest problems — weed management — from different directions.

TerraClear wants to allow a farmer to keep using a conventional precision sprayer, while making it dramatically more selective via its Weed Maps.

Carbon, meanwhile, is developing autonomous laser-weeding equipment itself, identifying and eliminating the individual weeds in real time without chemical spray or tractor operators.

The bigger opportunity for both companies may ultimately be neither maps nor lasers, but the underlying data they gather.

Every time a camera passes over a field, it can collect information about plants, soil, crop health and growing conditions. That’s vital information to farmers, seed producers, agriculture researchers and equipment manufacturers.

Genevieve Priebe took a business meeting this summer while bottle-feeding baby goats. A couple of years ago, she was advising executives at some of Seattle’s largest tech companies.

“Best decision I’ve ever made,” she said of her career change.

Priebe is the solo entrepreneur behind Reroot, a bootstrapped Seattle startup trying to make local food as easy to find and buy as anything else online.

The company operates a marketplace where independent farmers, ranchers, bakers and makers sell direct to customers, currently live with founding partners in the Pacific Northwest. In July it launched a free companion app, Reroot: Find Local Food, that maps more than 50,000 producers across the U.S. and parts of Canada.

She has also built a patent-pending tool called Walk & Talk, which lets a farmer update an online store by voice while walking the field, with or without a cell signal. When they’re back in range, it reconciles what they said against any sales that came in while they were offline.

A fourth-generation farm kid from Whitefish, Mont., Priebe grew up driving her dad’s tractor before she could reach the pedals and counting change at farmers markets for her mom, a flower farmer. She left for college and spent two decades in Seattle consulting, starting at Accenture and working for clients including Microsoft, T-Mobile, Starbucks and Boeing.

After her parents passed away, she and her brother took over the family farm. Priebe ran the numbers on what it takes to make a living growing food, and found it “close to impossible.” That’s a big part of what she’s now looking to solve as a startup founder.

“I didn’t want to be a founder,” she said, “but I couldn’t walk away from the problem.”

Continue reading for Priebe’s answers to our Startup Spotlight questionnaire.

In 50 words or less, give us your startup’s elevator pitch?

Local food is all around you, but finding it is hard. Buying it directly from the source is even harder. Reroot exists to fix that. We’re a discovery app and marketplace that connects independent producers to the people who love what they grow, raise and make.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

Something that perhaps most people wouldn’t see as a problem. That is: why is it easier to buy a mango from Peru than a tomato from a farm 10 miles away?

What surprised you after talking to customers?

My biggest surprise was that most small farms pay to be farmers. They don’t make money, they lose money. Less than 50% of the 1.9M farms in the US are profitable. Average median farm income is over a thousand dollars in the red. It’s no surprise that 15,000 farms go out of business every year and unfortunately the story isn’t much better for other independent food producers. Growing our food is one of the most important jobs, yet it’s close to impossible to make a living doing it.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

Dramatically. Two years ago, I’d have needed a 5-person development team, 18 months, and $1.5M to do what I’ve done solo in about four months. Traditional development cannot compare to the speed with which AI has enabled me to operate.

I do have a strong tech background, but haven’t written a single line of code and yet I’m live with a fully functioning marketplace that processes financial transactions, integrates with Square and Stripe, has sent over 100,000 marketing emails for our customers, manages inventory, fulfillment, and analytics. And, bonus — we just launched a free discovery app called Reroot: Find Local Food that maps 50,000+ local food producers in the US and parts of Canada.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

In a world of AI-powered, niche, technology businesses, people seem surprised at how simple the idea is. They assume it already exists. It doesn’t. There is no single place to discover, follow, and buy from local producers. That gap is exactly why I built Reroot.

What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?

Every advisor and investor I’ve talked to has told me to find a technical co-founder, and even better if he’s younger and male. The decision to ignore that advice and bootstrap solo as a woman in my forties was simultaneously the hardest decision I’ve made and the easiest. I’m choosing a different path than raise-and-burn: heads-down building for real customers who need what I’m making. It’s working.

What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?

Don’t overthink it. I spent decades in environments where every decision needed a PowerPoint deck and three rounds of approvals. The best thing I’ve done as a founder is just move: build it, ship it, learn, repeat.

We’ll know our company has made it when…

When the hardest part of farming is no longer the marketing. When farmers like my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents can actually afford to do the work that they love. And when I can conveniently replace most of my grocery store spend with local food purchased directly from my favorite producers.