AgShift, a California-based technology startup, is building what it claims is the world’s first autonomous food inspection system leveraging deep learning and computer vision, to reduce global food waste. The company has announced $2 million in seed funding to strengthen product development and expand customer reach. AgShift says it is currently working with a selec 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’s solution is said to blend 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 the 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.

"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, an early stage venture fund focused on frontier technologies shaping the future.

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."