The company putting a solar-powered set of eyes above the crop - measuring everything that matters to the plant, in real time.
Arable's dome-shaped Mark sensor sits inches above the crop canopy, drawing power from a 6-watt solar panel and reading the field the way a satellite would - only from up close. San Francisco, California.
For most of agriculture's history, the decision of when to water a field, how a crop is really faring, or whether stress is creeping in has come down to a walk through the rows and an experienced guess. Arable, a San Francisco company founded in 2014, is trying to replace that guess with a measurement.
Its answer is a single, unassuming device. The Arable Mark is a wire-free, dome-shaped sensor that sits above the plant canopy and reads more than 40 things at once - rainfall, solar radiation, canopy cover, crop water demand, microclimate, plant stress - then sends that data to a cloud platform where machine-learning models turn it into decisions a grower can act on.
The origin story runs through a science lab. Founder Adam Wolf had worked with the government of Kazakhstan on climate mitigation and came away convinced that the only durable way to fight hunger was with better data. He built the first Mark at Princeton with roughly $4 million in grant funding from the National Science Foundation, then launched Arable with co-founders Kelly Caylor and Ben Siegfried to get it into real fields.
What sets the approach apart is the order of operations. In an industry crowded with dashboards and forecasts, Arable started with rugged hardware that survives a working farm - IP67-rated, solar-powered, unattended for years - and built the analytics on top of the ground truth it collects. That inversion matters: a weather model is only as honest as the field data used to calibrate it, and Arable's sensors supply exactly that.
The company now describes deployments across roughly 19 countries, six continents and more than 20 crop types, with customers that range from the berry grower Driscoll's to the winemaker Treasury Wine Estates to the irrigation firm Valley Irrigation. Its CEO, Jim Ethington, arrived from The Climate Corporation, where he helped build Climate FieldView, one of the most widely adopted digital-agriculture tools on the market.
The larger backdrop is water. As it grows scarcer and more expensive, the winning agricultural technologies will be the ones that make conservation the cheaper choice rather than the noble one. That is squarely where Arable has positioned itself - and, in 2025, why Google chose it as a partner to bring crop intelligence to water-stressed farmers in southwest Nebraska.
Growers make high-stakes irrigation and crop-health calls with sparse, lagging information. Over-watering wastes a scarce resource; under-watering costs yield. Satellite and weather models drift without on-the-ground truth.
An above-canopy IoT sensor plus a cloud dashboard and app. It captures weather, plant, soil and irrigation data - and crop imagery - then delivers alerts and analytics on water demand, stress and growth stages.
Enterprise growers, food and beverage companies, vineyards, irrigation providers, seed-breeding and research programs, plus NGO and government climate initiatives from California to Africa.
Arable's platform measures everything that matters to the crop - from the weather to the soil, to the plant itself.- Arable, on its crop intelligence approach
A single Arable Mark 3 integrates spectral and thermal sensors - including a 22-band spectrometer - into one rugged housing, tracking dozens of signals simultaneously.
Bars are illustrative of relative measurement breadth, not calibrated accuracy.
Competitors such as CropX, Semios, Teralytic, Phytech and Sensoterra also wire fields with sensors. Arable's distinction is placement and breadth: one self-sustaining device above the canopy that captures weather, plant, soil and imagery together, rather than a scatter of single-purpose probes.
Because the Mark sees the crop the way a satellite does - but from inches away - its readings become the ground truth that calibrates larger models. That makes Arable useful not only to individual growers but to the enterprises and research programs that need trustworthy field data at scale.
The setup is deliberately boring in the best way: minutes to install, no wiring, no gateway, no babysitting. The technology a busy grower forgets is even there is the technology that actually gets used.
Wire-free, solar-powered sensor with a 22-band spectrometer measuring 40+ climate and plant metrics in an IP67 housing.
In-field imagery that links each crop photo to the exact weather and soil data of that moment for remote scouting.
Cloud dashboard and smartphone app that turn raw signals into visualizations, alerts and irrigation guidance.
Integration and calibration services that feed Arable's ground-truth data into enterprise models and workflows.
Arable sells hardware and layers recurring software and data subscriptions on top. Customers buy Mark sensors and pay for access to the analytics platform, APIs and connectivity - a B2B model aimed at enterprise growers, food and beverage companies, irrigation firms and research programs.
Public estimates put annual revenue in the neighborhood of $10 million with a team of roughly 89 people, funded by more than $100 million raised to date.
Arable sits in the on-farm decision-support and in-field sensing segment of agtech - recognized on SVG Ventures|THRIVE's Top 50 lists in 2023 and 2024, and named to Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2025 in agriculture.
Its broader competition includes satellite and weather-model providers and legacy weather-station networks. Arable's wedge is being the trusted source of ground truth those systems lack.
Adam Wolf, Kelly Caylor and Ben Siegfried commercialize the Mark sensor built with NSF funding at Princeton.
Middleland Capital and S2G Ventures back the push to bring the Mark to market.
Capital to expand sustainable-farming technology and grow international deployments.
Named IoT Monitoring Solution of the Year.
Raises $40M and launches the Mark 3 with a 22-band spectrometer and 40+ metrics.
Fast Company Most Innovative Company; water-conservation collaboration with Google in Nebraska.
Bringing water-conserving crop intelligence to farmers in southwest Nebraska.
The Osiris Project, aiming to support 100 million climate-resilient farmers in Africa by 2030.
Correlating weather, soil and irrigation with vineyard health and grape quality.
Explore Arable's crop intelligence in action and hear from the team.
Arable Mark 3 Demo ▶ Arable Labs Overview ▶ Jim Ethington Interview ▶Arable builds solar-powered, in-field IoT sensors and a cloud analytics platform that give growers real-time data on weather, soil, irrigation and crop health to guide farming decisions.
A wire-free, dome-shaped sensor that sits above the crop canopy and measures 40+ climate and plant metrics using spectral and thermal sensors, running unattended on solar power.
Enterprise growers, food and beverage companies, vineyards, irrigation providers and research programs - including Driscoll's, Treasury Wine Estates and Valley Irrigation - across roughly 19 countries and 22+ crop types.
Over $100M total, including a $40M Series C in July 2022, with investors such as Prelude Ventures, Middleland Capital and S2G Ventures.
Jim Ethington is CEO. He previously served as VP of Product at The Climate Corporation, where he helped build Climate FieldView.