Summers on a Peruvian tomato farm near the beach. Chores in the morning, cousins in the ocean by afternoon. That is where Jorge Heraud's story actually starts - not at Stanford, not at Trimble, not at John Deere. The grandson of a farmer learned early that agriculture runs on patience, observation, and an almost stubborn faith that the work you put into the ground comes back to you.
His father, a Stanford-trained engineer, returned to Peru to build an industrial automation company. That combination - hands in the soil, head in the circuitry - planted something that took four degrees, a 15-year career at a navigation company, and a $305 million exit to fully express itself.
Building Blue River, One Rejection at a Time
In 2011, Heraud co-founded Blue River Technology with Stanford PhD student Lee Redden. The pitch was audacious: use computer vision and machine learning to identify individual weeds in a farm field and spray only them, cutting herbicide use by up to 90%. At Series A, he collected somewhere between 25 and 30 rejection letters before Khosla Ventures said yes.
There was a detour. The deep learning capabilities needed for weed detection at scale didn't quite exist yet. So Blue River spent years thinning lettuce - a less glamorous but cash-positive pivot that kept the company alive while GPU technology caught up with the vision. That patience, that willingness to wait out the technology curve rather than hype a promise, is the through-line of Heraud's career.
"At Series A, I probably got 25 or 30 'No's before I got my first 'Yes' from Khosla." - Jorge Heraud
When the AI moment arrived, Blue River was ready. The See & Spray system became one of agriculture's most-watched innovations - a tractor attachment that could think, or at least distinguish a weed from a crop row with enough confidence to act on it. The technology eventually saved one farmer alone from $90,000 in annual chemical costs.
The $305M Question
John Deere acquired Blue River Technology in September 2017 for $305 million - unanimous board approval, Silicon Valley office kept intact. Heraud describes the deal with characteristic directness: "John Deere acquired Blue River just a week and a half ago... I'm very happy. They're a leading company... and they're acquiring us to accelerate us."
For the next seven years, he stayed inside the machine. As Vice President of Automation and Autonomy at John Deere, Heraud led a team of more than 600 engineers - a scale that few startup founders ever experience from the inside. He watched how a $50 billion company moves, where it gets stuck, and what a scrappy 12-person startup can do that a corporate team of hundreds genuinely cannot.
Lasers at the Speed of Light
He transitioned to an advisory role in 2024, quietly taking on board and advisor positions at Rootwave, Agtonomy, and Dogtooth Technologies - a harvesting robotics company where he now chairs the board. Then came TerraBlaster.
TerraBlaster, formerly named SoilCode, uses Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) - a technology originally developed for NASA's Mars exploration - to measure soil nutrients in real time. Nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium: the critical elements that determine whether a farmer over-applies fertilizer, under-applies it, or wastes thousands of dollars on a blunt guess. Heraud joined full-time as CEO in May 2025.
The problem he's targeting is specific and large. Between 30 and 50 percent of fertilizer applied to fields ends up in waterways. The reason is both economic and technological: soil testing is slow, expensive, and done at scales that miss field-level variation. "Farmers are making fertilizer decisions blind," Heraud says. "Soil sampling is every farmer's least favorite task in their already busy schedule."
TerraBlaster's answer: a laser pulse that takes less than one millisecond to fire and less than one millisecond to return a nutrient reading. "It is done at the speed of light," Heraud notes. The company raised a $4M oversubscribed seed round led by Khosla Ventures - the same firm that backed Blue River through its rocky early days - alongside Bidra (OCP Group's corporate venture arm), The Reservoir, and Trailhead Capital.
The De-Risker
Heraud has a phrase for his approach to new ventures. He describes himself as someone who "de-risks" before acting - not the founder who jumps out of a plane and figures out parachutes on the way down. He studies the problem, builds expertise, tests the thesis against reality, and only then commits. It's a philosophy shaped by the mistakes he's willing to name out loud: a business pivot at Blue River that chased a market with only three major buyers, losing leverage when one customer copied the technology internally and another changed leadership mid-relationship.
That methodical streak hasn't made him slower. It's made him selective. He has three stated goals for TerraBlaster: reduce wasted fertilizer while increasing farm yields, achieve an agtech IPO, and build a company where employees genuinely love working. In that order, on that timeline, with that specific ambition about the exit.
From a tomato farm near the Peruvian coast to a laser startup in Redwood City: the arc is strange, long, and entirely consistent. Heraud has spent his whole career at the intersection where the biological and the technological rub against each other. He keeps finding the spot where the two are furthest apart, and closing the gap.
