Female Entrepreneur Raises Funds to Eliminate Global Food Waste

AgShift was founded by Miku Jha, a passionate entrepreneur with a proven track record. She has led multiple startups from founding stage to successful acquisitions and mergers with companies such as IBM and Xyratex. As a product executive, she launched large scale enterprise products in mobile and internet of things for companies such as VMware and IBM.

“Current food inspection processes are paper-based and tedious, needing continuous personal training. Inconsistent and 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 and 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.”

It is with this goal in mind that Miku and AgShift has come up with a solution that blends deep learning with computer vision to autonomously inspect produce and other commodities for defects. It does quality assessments and makes judgements according to USDA specifications or an organization’s 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.

AgShift’s seasoned core team of Dr. Amitava Bhaduri and Rob O’Rourke bring together a combined experience of over 50 years, blending technology with food expertise across various companies such as Intel and Topco Associates.

With such expertise onboard, this startup based in California is building the world’s first autonomous food inspection system to ultimately reduce global food waste. It is to reach this goal that the tech startup raised $2 million in seed funding (announced recently) by first strengthening product development and expanding customer reach. AgShift is currently working with a select group of food industry leaders to bring their innovative platform to market.

“We have just begun to see the capabilities that this technology can bring to the food industry. AgShift can make a huge impact by helping to reduce 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 and CIO of Exfinity Ventures.

According to Miku Jha, “We have proven our core technology working... 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 a platform of choice for autonomous food inspection."