Sentera Releases Agriculture App With Autonomous Flight Planning; Raises $8.5 million Capital Round

Sentera, LLC, has announced the addition of autonomous UAV flight planning to its AgVaultTM 2.0 Mobile app. The added capability works with the DJI drones including the Phantom 4, Phantom 3, and Inspire families of products, providing the agriculture industry with a solution they describe as “an end-to-end normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) solution.” AgVault allows farmers to highlight a field, autonomously fly a UAV, capture precise imagery, manage data, produce QuickTileTM maps, and deliver data to a piece of equipment, all at the field edge.

“The AgVault 2.0 flight planning feature is an important advancement for growers and advisors. The software takes the guesswork out of UAV navigation, and delivers instant visibility to crop health,” said Kris Poulson, vice president of agriculture for Sentera. “A grower simply launches the UAV, then AgVault Mobile ensures high-quality imagery is captured exactly where the user desires.”

The app allows the operator to select the UAV’s altitude, sensor configuration, overlap, sideslip, and an area on their field to survey. The UAV launches from within the app, autonomously flies the predetermined route and automatically returns upon completion.

The AgVault 2.0 platform consists of  is comprised of desktop, mobile, and cloud components that automatically synchronize data with one another. The software is sensor, drone, and equipment agnostic, and compatible with most popular prescriptive analytics tools. Sentera’s AgVault 2.0 Software does not require an internet connection to operate, allowing growers to make data-driven crop health decisions at the field edge.

Sentera’s AgVault 2.0 Mobile App flight planning feature is part of the AgVault 2.0 The app is available for  free trial. You can learn more here.

In other Sentera news, the firm was successful in closing a Series A funding round of $8.5 million from undisclosed investors. The firm will use the funds to grow their staff and ramp up development. The Star Tribune quotes Eric Taipale, the company’s chief executive as stating,  “There is always going to be a discussion of what’s next, whether we do a Series B or hold tight for awhile. There’s no urgency.”