In alphabetical order.
EarthOptics, Intelinair SeedTrax, Pheno-Inspect, seedalive, Zeakal and ZoomAgri
EarthOptics GO1 – Turning Soil into Seed Intelligence
EarthOptics is transforming how the seed industry sees soil. By combining high-resolution mapping with biological and chemical insights, the company delivers powerful data that drives more informed decisions — before the seed ever hits the ground.
“Our mission from the beginning has been simple,” EarthOptics CEO Lars Dyrud says. “We want to measure everything of relevance in the soil — and give farmers and seed partners the intelligence they need to make the best decisions possible.”
With precise data on compaction, fertility, carbon, and soil biology, EarthOptics enables seed companies and agronomists to build smarter prescriptions and protect genetic potential with confidence.
“These are all questions farmers are making every year, but oftentimes they’re making their best guess,” chief product officer Cam Norgate says. “Now we can actually know.”
Following EarthOptics’ 2024 merger with Pattern Ag, the company now offers a full-stack platform—from physical and chemical measurements to DNA-based biological insights. This includes support for seed trials, trait validation, and product placement decisions at the field level.
“There’s a huge opportunity to understand how biological products can help boost yield potential,” Norgate says. “We help dealers identify what the opportunity is in the field—and make sure they get it onto the seed and into the ground.”
With demand for sustainable solutions and smarter ROI growing across agriculture, EarthOptics is helping the seed industry turn what’s beneath the soil into a strategic advantage.
“We’ve built a better way to plan a crop,” Dyrud says. “Now we’re focused on getting that power into more hands.”
Intelinair SeedTrax™ – Precision Built for Seed Corn Production
Seed corn isn’t just another crop — and SeedTrax isn’t just another digital platform. Developed through a powerful partnership between Hubner Industries and Intelinair, SeedTrax is the first digital tool purpose-built to handle the complexity, precision and scale of seed corn production.
While most ag tech is built for commercial grain, SeedTrax addresses the unique demands of seed production: tracking multiple hybrids in a single field, managing stand counts, detasseling, silking, rogueing, and scouting — all with traceability and actionable data.
“We were tired of always having to manipulate a tool that wasn’t built for what we do,” says Doug Hubner, CEO of Hubner Industries. “SeedTrax is changing that. It allows our field scouts and leadership team to see every acre in real time — with better intelligence and better results.”
The platform improves labor efficiency, enables smarter agronomic decisions, and generates more reliable supply estimates. Backed by aerial imagery, AI-driven insights, and real-time field data, SeedTrax helps experienced seed professionals manage more acres and mentor new scouts more effectively.
Pheno-Inspect AI in the Field to Transform Crop Monitoring
When Philipp Lottes founded Pheno-Inspect in early 2020, his vision was clear: bring advanced image-based AI technology out of the lab and directly into the hands of agricultural professionals. Drawing from his roots in agricultural robotics at the University of Bonn, Lottes saw a pressing need for scalable, practical tools that could serve real-world crop production and plant science.
Pheno-Inspect’s flagship platform, Plant-Analyzer, exemplifies this vision. It seamlessly integrates image data from a variety of sources — smartphones, drones, even satellites — to provide consistent, high-resolution insights across all stages of production. Whether it’s a small plot trial or a vast commercial field, the platform adapts to deliver meaningful, hardware-independent analysis.
At the heart of Pheno-Inspect’s approach is the fusion of artificial intelligence with deep agronomic expertise. “AI alone doesn’t create value — domain knowledge does,” Lottes emphasizes. His team builds AI models specifically designed for plant breeding and crop production, focusing on extracting economically relevant traits with high reliability and efficiency.
A major milestone came through their participation in the “RegisTer” project, which automated sugar beet variety evaluations. This initiative not only proved the feasibility of sub-millimeter trait detection under field conditions but also validated the use of affordable drone platforms. The success has since extended to a broader range of crops and continues to shape the company’s innovations.
Looking ahead, Lottes acknowledges that technology adoption hinges not only on performance but also on user trust and simplicity. “The true challenge is behavioral,” he notes. “That’s why we focus on intuitive, reliable tools that truly deliver.” As drone technology becomes more accessible, Pheno-Inspect aims to empower users across the globe to harness the full potential of AI-driven crop monitoring.
seedalive – Revolutionizing Seed Viability Testing Across Europe and Beyond
In the heart of Osnabrück, Germany, a groundbreaking innovation is transforming the way seed viability is measured. seedalive, founded by Klaus Mummenhoff and his former student, biologist Jens Varnskühler, is on a mission to make seed testing faster, simpler, and more reliable — empowering plant breeders, farmers, traders, and maltsters across Europe and beyond.
Traditionally, testing seeds for viability and quality has been a slow, resource-intensive process — often taking days or even weeks. seedalive changes that. With its patented, AI-powered test kits, seedalive delivers results in just hours. The dynamic bioassay not only predicts standard germination rates but also identifies abnormalities, dormancy, dead seeds, and germination speed — all while referencing data collected according to ISTA and AOSA standards.
And it’s not just about speed. The system is designed for modern agricultural realities: all it takes is a charged laptop and an internet connection. Whether on a remote farm or in a high-tech lab, seedalive’s cloud-based platform ensures fast, accurate, and reproducible results. For the malting industry, the platform offers equally transformative capabilities — assessing germination energy and water sensitivity of barley and wheat in as little as three hours.
seedalive’s technology is not just a tool — it’s a shift in paradigm. By significantly reducing the time and energy required for seed testing, it supports more sustainable agricultural practices and better decision-making across the value chain.
As the company grows, its vision remains clear: to become the new global gold standard in seed viability testing. With an energetic team and ongoing research collaborations, seedalive is not just keeping pace with the industry — it’s setting the pace.
ZeaKal PhotoSeed™ – Boosting Yield and Quality While Reducing Carbon Intensity
In an industry chasing more with less, ZeaKal’s PhotoSeed™ technology is giving crops a new kind of superpower: the ability to sustain photosynthesis longer, leading to bigger gains in oil, protein, and productivity — all without additional land or inputs.
“We confuse the plant into thinking it’s starving,” ZeaKal co-founder and CEO Han Chen says. “It’s the anti-Ozempic of plants.” That trick keeps plants working harder and longer to convert sunlight into energy, improving performance and sustainability.
ZeaKal’s trait technology, has roots in a surprising place — a napkin sketch in New Zealand. What began as an effort to improve pasture grass grew into something much bigger.
In soybeans, PhotoSeed reverses declining protein levels while increasing oil by up to 15%. In corn, it’s showing as much as 23% more oil. That’s a game-changer for renewable energy, particularly sustainable aviation fuel. Independent analysis suggests PhotoSeed could enable an extra billion gallons of U.S. SAF annually — without expanding farmland.
But ZeaKal’s ambitions go beyond yield. With its “NewType” model, the company hopes to rebuild supply chains around value instead of volume, helping farmers become price makers, not price takers.
“I want growers to say, ‘I know where my crop ends up. I know I’m feeding people better. I know I’m part of the energy transition,’” says Chen.
With PhotoSeed reaching growers in 2026, ZeaKal is betting on a future where innovation fuels not just crops — but a better food, fuel, and climate future. Watch for a more comprehensive feature about ZeaKal in Seed World U.S. June issue.
ZoomAgri Transforms Grain Quality Inspection with AI-Driven Innovation
ZoomAgri is revolutionizing the agricultural landscape with its innovative software that rapidly identifies soybean, wheat, and barley varieties in just two minutes. By utilizing cutting-edge Computer Vision and AI technology, this solution delivers precise results at a fraction of the cost.
In addition to variety identification, the software excels in assessing the percentage of damaged, broken, or peeled grains while also detecting foreign materials — each critical for ensuring quality in the supply chain.
ZoomAgri’s mission is to digitize the antiquated testing, inspection, and certification (TIC) processes that burden the agricultural and food industries through its unique “vision-as-a-service” (VaaS) model.
Since the launch of its flagship product, ZoomBarley, in 2018 — which evaluates malting barley purity in real-time — the technology has gained significant traction on a global scale. Building on this success, ZoomAgri introduced ZoomAgriSpex, a tool designed to evaluate the physical quality of grains and oilseeds in real-time. This feature addresses common issues within the industry, such as classification errors, delays, and inflated costs, making high-quality inspections much more efficient and reliable.
The implications of this groundbreaking technology extend beyond mere convenience — by streamlining quality assessments, ZoomAgri empowers stakeholders throughout the supply chain to optimize resource allocation and minimize waste. This translates into more efficient distribution processes, better use of transport and land, and ultimately, a more sustainable agricultural system.
In an industry where every grain counts, ZoomAgri is not just improving how we assess quality; it’s setting a new standard for efficiency and effectiveness in agricultural practice.
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