Tevel Aerobotics

The problem: fruit left on the tree

Tevel (Tevel Aerobotics Technologies) was founded in 2017 by Yaniv Maor. It works in a field now called physical AI: systems that make decisions in the real world, not only on a screen. Its starting point is a shortage of workers. According to an estimate by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization quoted in a report on the company, the availability of pickers in orchards fell by about half in twenty years, while fruit output doubled. Maor explained that the situation in orchards is harder than in greenhouses, because the harvest season is short and orchards are usually in remote areas without enough local workers.

How it works: drones tethered to a vehicle

The system is called FAR, short for Flying Autonomous Robot. It is made of a wheeled ground vehicle that drives between the rows of trees and several small drones tethered to it by a cable that supplies them with power. Each drone carries a camera and a gripping arm. Computer vision algorithms tell fruit apart from leaves and branches, estimate its size and ripeness, and plan a flight path that does not hit the tree. After picking, the drone places the fruit on the vehicle's platform, and the system can also work at night, as long as the vehicle's battery lasts. According to the company, the drones can maneuver in six degrees of freedom, so the same hardware suits different trees and growing methods.

Funding and investors

In January 2021 the company raised $20 million, with two large Asian agricultural equipment makers, Japan's Kubota and China's Forbon, alongside venture capital funds including Maverick Ventures Israel, OurCrowd and AgFunder. According to the same report, this was its third round, after a $10 million Series A in 2019 and a $1.4 million seed round in 2017, and it also received a $2.5 million grant from the Israel Innovation Authority. It is worth noting that the report was published on a site whose parent company is AgFunder, one of the investors, and the report says so itself.

From the lab to the orchard

According to a 2023 report, Tevel's robots had been working in Europe since 2021 and in the United States since 2022. Its strategy for entering the market is partnering with makers of harvesting machines: with S&S Metal Fabrication it built a system called Alpha-Bot, meant for picking apples and stone fruit in California for the grower HMC Farms, and with Italy's Darwin Harvesting Group it served the Rivoira group. That same year the company was chosen as one of ten winners of the new products competition at the World Ag Expo in California. The company claims a 20% to 30% reduction in the grower's total costs, but these figures come from the company itself.

2026: the growth stage

In September 2026 Tevel was described as a company at the Series C stage, one of 23 companies chosen for the first cohort of the ScaleUp House program. According to the same description, its platform picks apples, oranges and palm fruit, and the company works with juice makers, food producers and agricultural machine makers. According to the profile, which was written as part of the program, the company had by then delivered work worth about $3 million to these partners, a figure that comes from the company. Tevel's story shows the gap between an impressive demonstration and a broad business: the technology already works in the field, and the open question is whether it is cheap and reliable enough to replace manual labor on a large scale.