AgZen—a startup behind a “feedback optimized” smart spraying system utilized on almost a million acres of farmland in its second year of commercial operation—has teamed up with Corteva to explore how the pair can further optimize crop inputs.
The agreement includes lab and field testing, says Corteva’s crop protection business & strategy enablement lead Marta Garcia, who said working with AgZen would help Corteva “identify opportunities to optimize efficiency and effectiveness across our crop protection portfolio.”
30-50% reductions in chemical inputs
Traditional “spray and pray” approaches to applying crop inputs are increasingly being replaced with precision ag tools helping farmers apply pesticides or fertilizer exactly where they’re needed.
But even when farmers are spraying on target, says AgZen CEO Vishnu Jayaprakash, most of them still have no idea if they are spraying the right amount, or how much of the input is staying on the target plant and making a difference.
Born out of more than a decade of research at the Varanasi research group at MIT and backed by a $10 million Series A from DCVC Bio and Material Impact announced earlier this year, Somerville, MA-based AgZen has two core products that directly tackle this problem.
RealCoverage is a unit stacked with cameras that can be bolted onto any sprayer and linked to a tablet in the cab to show the operator what is happening to the droplets in real time. Based on that data and the conditions at the time, the AI-powered system can tell operators how to optimize everything on the sprayer, from which nozzle to use, to pressure, boom height and droplet size, to how fast to drive and how many gallons of spray per acre (GPA) is best for a particular chemical mix on a particular crop in a specific location.
This can enable 30-50% reductions in chemical inputs, claims Jayaprakash, who says AgZen has expanded US coverage from 65,000 acres in 2024 to 970,000 acres in 2025 on row and specialty crops, and is now extending the tech into Brazil and Australia.
EnhanceCoverage—AgZen’s second product—is a nozzle that cloaks droplets with adjuvants (rather than simply mixing them in), dramatically increasing the likelihood they will stick to plants, rather than bounce off them, enabling farmers and growers to make further reductions in chemical use, he told AgFunderNews.
“We launched this on a pilot basis earlier this year with five units and extremely good results so we plan to expand the pilot next year [with a view to making it] available for wider commercial purchase in 2027.”
“I was getting a chem shuttle refilled at [the] co-op, these guys have always been complimentary of our weed control. I asked them, ‘What percentage of leaf surface area do you think you are covering with your sprayers? One of their best operators said he thought 50%. The salesman next to him said it would definitely be more than 60%. They were shocked when I told them we were at 9 to 10%.” Corey McIntosh, 4,000-acre corn and soybean grower, Missouri Valley, IA
“I was excited to see how much of what I’m spraying is actually reaching my plants. Especially with adjuvants, it’s very tough to determine which ones are for real and which ones are sub-par or a complete waste of money.” Bryan Brost, 12,000-acre corn and Soybean grower, Oxford, IN
‘We’re taking off the blindfold’
Beyond the immediate benefits of helping farmers spray more effectively in real time, AgZen can help the wider industry understand how droplet coverage and lifetime relate to the efficacy of every chemical input used on-farm, claimed Jayaprakash.
“We’ve been spraying at scale for 80+ years, but no one has been able to measure how many droplets of chemicals are actually getting onto the weeds or crops, which makes it difficult to judge both the efficacy of the chemicals and the efficiency of application. We’re taking off the blindfold.
“That’s where we see this [work with Corteva] going. Corteva’s strengths are in agronomy, formulation science, understanding how the formulation interacts with the crop or weed, and we bring the expertise of droplet monitoring, optimization and closing the feedback loop.”
He added: “We’ve already unlocked some very interesting things that neither team knew before that could have a dramatic impact on how these chemicals work in fields.”
AgZen has been growing extremely rapidly, and expects to “grow very significantly again this year,” he said. “We have expanded our dealer network from five dealers to 15, and being able to partner with one of the world’s largest ag input providers also provide confidence to our customers… we’re working with people actually selling the chemicals to figure out the best way to spray them.”
Rapid payback
Last year, he said, “70% of all of our units were dealer supported. This upcoming year, 100% will be dealer supported, which has been super important in enabling us to scale without needing to scale our team accordingly. Our customers also have long-term relationships with these dealers.”
Growers can either pay for AgZen’s RealCoverage system outright or sign up for a lease-to-own program, he said. “On 5,000+ acres of soybeans the system can pay for itself in a year,” claimed Jayaprakash.
Watch our interview with Jayaprakash at World Agri-Tech in San Francisco last fall:
Further reading:
Meet the founder: AgZen’s Vishnu Jayaprakash on spraying, praying, and sticky droplets…
Corteva’s planned separation raises questions about AI and data split
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