Lettuce-Weeding Robots, Coming Soon to a Farm Near You

The Sunnyvale, California-based company makes farming machines. "I bet we're the only startup with a tractor behind our offices," CEO Jorge Heraud says. Nevertheless, it is still very much a tech startup. Blue River's machines are robots that help farmers manage their fields more efficiently. The old-school approach is to drench an entire field in weed-killing chemicals, but Blue River combines computer vision and sophisticated machine learning algorithms to spray selectively.