In each of our podcasts, we ask top hardware entrepreneurs the same 10 questions to better understand the challenges and best practices in starting a hardware company. In Season 2 Episode 6, Lemnos’s Eric Klein speaks with Sébastien Boyer and Thomas Palomares, co-founders of FarmWise, a Lemnos portfolio company that recently announced a $5.7 million Seed Round raise.

Thomas: When we finished our graduate studies, we were interested in ways that computer vision and natural learning could improve people’s lives. My grandparents were farmers, so it has always been a field in which I was really interested. We started to talk a lot of farmers, understand their daily problems and what were the issues preventing them from going fully organic. We realized they were using a lot of pesticides because they didn’t have a better solution or because it was a very harsh process to do manually. We felt like we could come up with a way of making their job easier and moving them to a more sustainable way of farming.

Sébastien: Both Thomas and I, we define ourselves as software guys, so we’ve actually never really worked on hardware before. We’ve played with some Legos and we’ve built a few pieces of furniture, but really, this was our first serious hardware project. Interestingly, it was also our first startup.

Thomas: The long-term vision of our project is to automate pretty much everything from seeding to harvesting. Obviously, as a startup, we want to start very focused, so we started with the weeding process.

Sébastien: Currently the two main ways farmers are dealing with weeds in the field is either by spraying herbicides throughout the field or by hiring people to go out there and use very basic tools. We are basically providing an alternative to those processes.

Sébastien: As pretty young entrepreneurs, surrounding ourselves with experienced and talented people was very instrumental. As soon as we graduated, we joined an accelerator program in the Valley, which was a very good program and well connected and helped us get in touch with a lot of mentors—both technical mentors and business-oriented mentors. Obviously not everyone is interested or excited about what you’re doing, but you just need a couple of people to be excited enough to really push you through this first hurdle of trying to build this network. Now we’re very lucky to be working with five official mentors—purely technical people with experience building products, but also people coming from the farming industry and business people with experience in other industries.

Sébastien: At the very beginning, the reason why we choose this accelerator was for the network. We were very honest with ourselves about being young, international founders. So obviously, our network at the very beginning was close to zero. Choosing an accelerator that’s actually in San Francisco and has a reputation for being well connected was instrumental for us. We had come from software background, so we wanted to surround ourselves as soon as possible with people with experience building hardware products and hardware companies. Lemnos was, by reputation in the Valley, one of