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Having met at the UC Davis Wine Executive Program, Kia Behnia, CEO, and Mason Earles, CTO, founded Scout to replicate the best sensor in the vineyard, “the farmer’s eye.” Leveraging off-the-shelf hardware, Scout uses AI to process images taken from a tractor to automate vineyard mapping, vine counting, yield forecasting, virus identification, and more. From managing vineyard assets to implementing precision agriculture to improve quality, Scout is harnessing the power of AI to optimize vineyard management.
Detailed Show Notes:
Mason’s background - UC Davis Professor, Apple, AI & agriculture
Kia’s background for Scout - owns the Neotempo wine brand, worked at Splunk, the “data for everything” company
The official company name is Agricultural Scout, dba Scout, the website is agscout.ai, so it can be called any of those names
Founded in 2022, initially more hardware-based, but pivoted to an intelligence company using off-the-shelf hardware
The goal is to “replicate the farmer’s eye” with an AI-based solution using cameras, tractors, and Scout cloud and mobile app (which can be used offline); the brain is centered around a phone
US only today (~50-100 clients, 300 blocks, 2M vines, processed 56M photos), going international in 2026
4 main use cases currently:
3 types of clients
Benefits include:
Bench Vineyards discovered 1 acre of missing vines out of 24 acres and filled them in
Pricing is a subscription model, $150-180/acre per scan
New product in beta in July 2025 - ChatGPT Scout for vineyards
Marketing mostly through word of mouth, industry trade shows, and webinars have been effective, as has partnership with Monarch (already tech enthusiasts)
Barriers to purchase are often due to farming budgets built around labor
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
5
102102 ratings
Having met at the UC Davis Wine Executive Program, Kia Behnia, CEO, and Mason Earles, CTO, founded Scout to replicate the best sensor in the vineyard, “the farmer’s eye.” Leveraging off-the-shelf hardware, Scout uses AI to process images taken from a tractor to automate vineyard mapping, vine counting, yield forecasting, virus identification, and more. From managing vineyard assets to implementing precision agriculture to improve quality, Scout is harnessing the power of AI to optimize vineyard management.
Detailed Show Notes:
Mason’s background - UC Davis Professor, Apple, AI & agriculture
Kia’s background for Scout - owns the Neotempo wine brand, worked at Splunk, the “data for everything” company
The official company name is Agricultural Scout, dba Scout, the website is agscout.ai, so it can be called any of those names
Founded in 2022, initially more hardware-based, but pivoted to an intelligence company using off-the-shelf hardware
The goal is to “replicate the farmer’s eye” with an AI-based solution using cameras, tractors, and Scout cloud and mobile app (which can be used offline); the brain is centered around a phone
US only today (~50-100 clients, 300 blocks, 2M vines, processed 56M photos), going international in 2026
4 main use cases currently:
3 types of clients
Benefits include:
Bench Vineyards discovered 1 acre of missing vines out of 24 acres and filled them in
Pricing is a subscription model, $150-180/acre per scan
New product in beta in July 2025 - ChatGPT Scout for vineyards
Marketing mostly through word of mouth, industry trade shows, and webinars have been effective, as has partnership with Monarch (already tech enthusiasts)
Barriers to purchase are often due to farming budgets built around labor
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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