F3 Innovate awards $200,000 to five startups
F3 Innovate (F3i) announced Oct. 22 the recipients of $200,000 in Innovation Grant funding. The grants were awarded to five early-stage companies developing technologies in automation, water efficiency, soil health, and plant analytics. The awards mark the latest step in F3i’s mission to build the Central Valley into a global hub for agricultural innovation by developing and testing solutions that shape agriculture’s next era.
The first round of the F3i Innovation Grant program focused on technologies addressing key challenges throughout the agricultural value chain—spanning plant nutrition and soil health, automation and robotics, early disease detection, and postharvest and supply chain optimization. In addition to funding, the program offers mentorship, pilot coordination, and commercialization support to help innovators test, refine, and deploy their solutions directly in farm environments.
“We’re thrilled to partner with these five companies in the inaugural round of the Innovation Grant,” said Priscilla Koepke, CEO of F3 Innovate. “Each team is developing critical technologies with the potential to make a real impact in agriculture. We’re excited to support these companies as they test, refine, and scale their solutions in collaboration with growers across the Valley.”
2025 F3i Innovation Grant Recipients
Senseen: Using its Nutriscope™ AI system, Senseen is developing almond-specific calibrations to measure macro- and micronutrients directly from leaf scans, offering growers real-time nutrition insights and paving the way for next-generation plant health analytics.
Eco2Mix’s Push Water Project: Building on research with American Pistachio Growers and Fresno State, the Push Water Project will quantify soil health improvement and nitrogen savings using carbonic acid, and will publish the first actionable data of its kind for the agriculture sector.
Gather: Gather’s semi-autonomous Rover automates crop transport between pickers and packers in vineyards, improving harvest speed and worker safety. Compact and GPS-free, it delivers practical automation to farms of any size.
Milano Technical Group: Milano Technical Group’s autonomy software stack will provide navigation, fleet management, and telemetry as a plug-and-play API for any ag robot platform, allowing hardware developers to deploy fully functional autonomy within weeks instead of months.
Budbreak: Budbreak’s vineyard robots detect early signs of vine disease like red blotch and leafroll, flagging and marking affected vines for removal. Each robot captures high resolution imagery synced to a web dashboard, giving growers a 24/7 digital field scout.
Gather’s autonomous robot, Rover.
The selection panel for the inaugural Innovation Grant brought together leaders from across production agriculture, policy, workforce development, entrepreneurship, and venture innovation. Panelists included Priscilla Koepke, CEO of F3 Innovate; F3i board members Drew Ketelsen of HMC Farms and Danna Stroud of the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz); Christine Birdsong of the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA); and Connie Bowen of Farmhand Ventures.
“As growers, we face constant variability—weather, labor, logistics, and regulatory environments. Technology needs to make a leap forward to help us manage that complexity. Today, the $200K invested across five companies is a powerful step in that direction, and importantly, it’s only one part of a broader F3i ecosystem spanning commercialization, talent development, and funding,” said Drew Ketelsen, vice president at HMC Farms and F3i board member. “Today’s milestone is part of a larger strategy that positions F3i and its partners to invest in ideas, nurture communication and learning across the sector, and create new resources and tools to overcome bottlenecks and deliver real impact in the field.”
“We’re not just funding isolated projects, we’re building the foundation for agriculture’s next era,” said Priscilla Koepke. “Commercialization, talent, and capital can’t operate in silos. The future depends on integrating these systems, aligning education and workforce development, commercialization, and investment, so breakthroughs can scale at the pace needed. And the Central Valley, with its unmatched agricultural production and network, is the place to prove it.”
The Innovation Grant program is part of F3i’s broader vision to build a global hub for agricultural innovation, where technologies don’t develop in isolation, but advance through collaboration and new infrastructure among university teams, workforce leaders, growers, and companies who test, validate, and scale them with speed and efficiency.
Main image: The team at Eco2Mix.