Farm­hand with AI-powered deweed­ing skill

Jyoti Banthia 03 Aug 2026
https://www.pressreader.com/india/businessline-chennai-9wvv/20260803/281775635961259

Robot with pre­ci­sion spray­ing tech­no­logy travels from Bengaluru to the US mar­ket

Bengaluru­based Niqo Robot­ics is tak­ing its agri robot­ics tech­no­logy bey­ond India — after com­mer­cial­ising its flag­ship AI­powered Robo­Weeder in the US, it recently ven­tured into Aus­tralia.

Foun­ded in 2015 by Jais­imha Rao, Niqo Robot­ics began by solv­ing a fun­da­mental chal­lenge in robot­ics — enabling machines to under­stand unstruc­tured phys­ical envir­on­ments and take pre­cise action in real time. Agri­cul­ture emerged as one of the toughest use cases because of the vari­ations in crop con­di­tions, weather, light­ing and ter­rain, says Rao.

The com­pany uses com­puter vis­ion, edge AI and robot­ics to identify weeds for select­ive applic­a­tion of herb­i­cides, instead of blanket spray­ing an entire field. Moun­ted on tract­ors, the Robo­Weeder cap­tures plant imagery through AI­enabled cam­eras, pro­cesses the inform­a­tion onboard, and clas­si­fies crops and weeds in real time before car­ry­ing out the tar­geted spray­ing.

This reduces herb­i­cide usage, lowers input costs, improves weed con­trol and reduces depend­ence on manual labour, while pro­tect­ing crop yields, Rao says.

The star­tup next plans to take the

Robo­Weeder to Europe and other mech­an­ised agri­cul­tural mar­kets. “We are build­ing towards prof­it­ab­il­ity in the near future,” Rao says.

In focus are cul­tiv­at­ors of spe­ci­al­ity crops, for whom labour short­age and rising oper­at­ing costs have accel­er­ated the adop­tion of pre­ci­sion agri­cul­ture tech­no­lo­gies.

Rao describes the US as an attract­ive com­mer­cial mar­ket because the grow­ers there increas­ingly eval­u­ate tech­no­lo­gies based on the meas­ur­able pro­ductiv­ity gains and return on invest­ment.

“The two mar­kets (India and the US) have played com­ple­ment­ary roles. India sup­por­ted product devel­op­ment and real­world learn­ing, while the US provided an adop­tion­ready mar­ket for suc­cess­ful com

mer­cial­isa­tion. These learn­ings are now sup­port­ing our expan­sion into Aus­tralia and other inter­na­tional mar­kets,” Rao says.

FULL-STACK ADVANTAGE

While hard­ware sales dom­in­ate the star­tup’s rev­enue, its AI cap­ab­il­it­ies are embed­ded into the equip­ment rather than sold as sep­ar­ate soft­ware sub­scrip­tions. Depend­ing on the geo­graphy, Niqo sells dir­ectly to grow­ers or through agri­cul­tural equip­ment deal­ers. It is also devel­op­ing mul­tiple vari­ants of the Robo­Weeder for var­ied farm sizes and oper­at­ing con­di­tions.

Rao says Niqo’s com­pet­it­ive advant­age lies in its full­stack ‘phys­ical AI’ plat­form, which com­bines pro­pri­et­ary cam­eras, light­ing sys­tems, machine vis­ion, edge com­put­ing, crop­spe­cific AI mod­els and pre­ci­sion actu­ation into a single com­mer­cial product.

“We have accu­mu­lated sev­eral years of plant data with a high degree of vari­ab­il­ity. As more com­mer­cial units oper­ate across more acres, they gen­er­ate addi­tional field data to enhance the sys­tem’s per­form­ance,” he explains.

Man­u­fac­tur­ing spe­cial­ised hard­ware calls for sus­tained invest­ment in cre­at­ing a resi­li­ent sup­ply chain and hir­ing tal­ent that under­stands both soft­ware and phys­ical sys­tems, he observes.

“Any fresh cap­ital would primar­ily sup­port tak­ing our proven com­mer­cial product into new geo­graph­ies and scal­ing up Niqo as a global phys­ical AI com­pany ori­gin­at­ing from India,” he says.