Midnight Robotics

Midnight Robotics, founded in Tel Aviv, Israel, in May 2019, developed autonomous driving technology tailored for the agricultural sector. The company was established by Yonatan Horovitz and Edo Reshef, both of whom brought considerable experience from the LiDAR technology firm Innoviz. Their collective expertise in autonomous systems and computer vision was pivotal in addressing the operational inefficiencies and labor shortages prevalent in commercial farming.

The firm's core offering was a retrofit kit capable of converting standard tractors into autonomous vehicles. This product utilized advanced LiDAR perception algorithms, enabling machinery to operate with high precision for tasks such as spraying and harvesting without a human driver. The business model centered on providing this hardware, which could be installed on a farm's existing equipment in under a day, and integrating it with a data-driven platform. This platform collects operational data, translating it into actionable insights for farm managers and facilitating guided decision-making and autonomous execution from a single dashboard.

In November 2021, Midnight Robotics was acquired by Fieldin, a smart farm operations management company. This strategic merger combined Midnight Robotics' autonomous vehicle technology with Fieldin's extensive dataset of farm operations, which included over 49 million hours of tractor driving data at the time of the acquisition. The integration created a comprehensive solution allowing farmers to move from operational insights to autonomous action. Following the acquisition, Horovitz and Reshef joined Fieldin as Chief Autonomy Officer and Chief Technology Officer, respectively, and were also named co-founders of the newly combined entity.

Keywords: agricultural technology, autonomous tractors, farm automation, LiDAR perception, precision agriculture, retrofit kits, smart farming, AgTech, autonomous machinery, computer vision, farm management software, autonomous navigation, robotics in agriculture, data-driven farming, autonomous vehicle technology, crop management, harvesting automation, spraying automation, agricultural efficiency, farm data analytics