FarmWise Brand Guidelines: The 2016 San Francisco Weeding-Robot Start-Up Bought by Taylor Farms

Two engineers and a weeding robot.

FarmWise began in San Francisco in 2016. English Wikipedia gives the company’s full name as FarmWise Labs, Inc. and its founders as Sébastien Boyer, a graduate of the École Polytechnique and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Thomas Palomares, a graduate of the École Polytechnique and Stanford University. Its first product was an automated mechanical weeder that used artificial intelligence, computer vision and robotics to pull out weeds in vegetable fields.

The early years followed the start-up route. With a first prototype, Wikipedia says, the founders went through the Alchemist Accelerator and the THRIVE by SVG accelerator in 2017, and in December 2017 the company closed a seed round from investors including Playground Global and Felicis Ventures. In 2018, with a second-generation robot working, it began pilot programmes with two early customers on California’s Central Coast and became a resident of the Western Growers Association’s Center for Innovation and Technology. A Series A round followed in September 2019, led by Calibrate Ventures, and in October 2020 the company opened a location in Yuma, Arizona, and began working in California’s Imperial Valley.

Over time the company moved closer to its customers. By September 2024 The Robot Report described FarmWise as based in Salinas, and its website today lists offices in Salinas and Santa Clara. Its chief executive in that period was Tjarko Leifer, who was quoted as chief executive at the launch of the Vulcan in February 2023.

The founders drew notice of their own. Wikipedia says Forbes included them in its “2019 30 Under 30: Manufacturing & Industry” list, and that MIT Technology Review named Sébastien Boyer in its “Innovators Under 35 Europe 2018.”

From the Titan to the Vulcan.

FarmWise’s first commercial machine was big and self-contained. In March 2019, Wikipedia says, the company partnered with Roush, the Michigan manufacturing and automotive company, to build the third generation of its robotic weeder, the Titan FT-35: a self-propelled tractor with a smart implement carrying cameras, sensors and robotic arms. Rather than selling the machine, FarmWise sold weeding as a service, charged by the acre. The company trained its software on millions of crop images so the machine could tell crops from weeds, according to Wikipedia.

The second product changed the model. In February 2022 Future Farming reported that FarmWise would release a new weeder that year, the Vulcan, to be mounted on a tractor and run as a PTO-driven, modular implement, and that it had been presented at the FIRA agricultural-robot event in Toulouse; at the time the Titan FT-35 was the company’s only offering. The Vulcan was launched at the World Ag Expo in February 2023, where it was named to the show’s Top-10 New Products list, Vegetable Growers News reported. The company said it could weed more than 20 vegetable crops, including lettuce and broccoli, and that operators could adjust its blades from an in-cab monitor.

Today the FarmWise website calls the Vulcan a “next-generation intra-row weeder and precision cultivator,” with a modular, component-based build, software updates sent over the air and weeding settings that growers can tune from the cab.

Distribution and awards followed. In September 2024 FarmWise announced an exclusive partnership with RDO Equipment Co. to deliver the Vulcan to vegetable growers in the Southwest United States, The Robot Report reported; in the same report Ted Taylor of Taylor Farms said his company had worked with FarmWise since 2019 and had bought its first Vulcan the previous December. Wikipedia lists earlier recognition including an AgFunder Innovation Award nomination in 2018, a French American Business Award to the founders in 2019 and a “Good Robot” award from Silicon Valley Robotics in 2020.

Design and documentation.

Precision-farming and agricultural-robot companies sell technology that most people never see up close, so their imagery has to do a lot of explaining. The most familiar picture is a machine working a long crop row, shot low and often in the warm light of early morning or evening, with the rows running away toward the horizon. It speaks of scale and repetition: the field is large, and the machine passes over every metre of it.

The second recurring picture is the screen. Guidance and control makers show in-cab displays filled with colour field maps — bands of colour for harvest, seeding or coverage — with a small tractor or sprayer icon tracing its path. Drone-eye views of fields do similar work from outside the cab, turning a farm into a grid, a patchwork or a set of passes that reads almost like a diagram.

People appear too, usually as working figures rather than models: a farmer at the edge of a field holding a tablet, an engineer kneeling beside a robot between the plants, a dealer pointing at a display. Robot makers lean on close-ups of cameras, solar panels and wheels, and on small machines set against wide open ground.

Much of this imagery is made for the trade-show calendar. Launches cluster around large events such as Agritechnica in Hanover, World FIRA, the agricultural-robotics meeting in France, and the Farm Progress Show in the American Midwest, where companies build branded stands, demonstration plots and live field runs. For a designer the visual language is consistent: greens and earth tones taken from the field, high-contrast interface colour taken from the screens, and clean sans-serif type that looks at home on a display.

From start-up to a salad grower’s business.

FarmWise did not stay independent. In early 2025 the company announced a restructuring and an eventual winding down, AgFunderNews reported on 4 April 2025, and in that report Tjarko Leifer said ensuring service for existing customers was the top priority. The same week Taylor Farms, the ready-to-eat salad producer based in Salinas, announced that it had acquired FarmWise’s business. Financial terms were not disclosed, and AgFunderNews noted that Taylor Farms had already invested in FarmWise through its Series B round in 2022.

Taylor Farms’ announcement described FarmWise as an agricultural technology robotics company specialising in precision weeding and thinning, and said it would immediately begin a transition to keep service going for Vulcan customers. Ted Taylor, president of Taylor Farms’ agricultural operations, said: “We believe in the FarmWise technology and think we have an important role to play with industry adoption in the specialty crop space.” Leifer said he was “incredibly proud” of what the team had built.

Since then FarmWise has been a business owned by Taylor Farms rather than an independent start-up. Its website still carries the FarmWise name, the “FarmWise Labs” mark and the Vulcan, and still quotes a Taylor Farms farm manager on the machine.

For a design guide, FarmWise shows how a robotics start-up can move from a self-driving machine to an implement that fits behind a grower’s own tractor, and end up owned by one of its customers. Compare Carbon Robotics, another American weeding-machine maker, and Monarch Tractor, another California farm-machine start-up. For this guide we use a deep green, a steel grey and a pale haze with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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