A drone that reads every plant in a field, then sprays only the ones that don't belong. Same yield, up to 95% less chemical.
Every time a farmer sprays a field of row crops, roughly 80% of the herbicide lands on bare ground, and another 15% or so hits the crop itself - the plant you are trying to protect. Which means the actual target, the weed, receives a rounding error's worth of what leaves the tank. This is an expensive way to poison dirt.
Precision AI, a company founded in 2018 in Regina, Saskatchewan, looked at that arithmetic and drew the obvious-in-hindsight conclusion: the problem is not the chemical, it is the aim. If a machine could tell a weed from a wheat plant and spray only the weed, you could - the company claims - cut herbicide use by up to 95% and still bring in the same yield. The savings pencil out to around $52 an acre per season.
The obvious-in-hindsight part is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because telling a weed from a crop at speed, from the air, in real time, is genuinely hard. It is a computer-vision problem of the kind that did not have a good answer until fairly recently. The industry name for the hardest version - spotting a green weed against a green crop - is "green-on-green," and it is roughly as difficult as it sounds.
So Precision AI built the perception system first: deep-learning models that classify every plant passing beneath the machine and decide, on the spot, whether to open a nozzle. Then it had to put that brain on something that could fly over a lot of acres without stopping. This is where the company gets genuinely unusual.
Most agricultural spray drones are electric quadcopters. They are nimble and they are also, from a farmer's economic standpoint, small: modest tanks, short flight times, a lot of landing to swap batteries. Precision AI went the other way. Its flagship product, the Stratus AirSprayer, uses a flexible "flexwing" - essentially a paraglider canopy - and a gas engine. The result carries a 60- or 100-gallon tank, stays aloft up to five hours before refueling, and covers about 92 acres an hour.
Choosing gasoline over batteries in a company with "sustainable agriculture" in its mission statement is the sort of decision that looks contradictory until you think about it for ten seconds. A drone sitting on the ground charging is not spraying anything, and it is not saving any chemical either. The environmental win here is the 95% herbicide reduction, not the propulsion. Precision AI optimized for the constraint the farmer actually feels - uptime - and let the airframe be whatever got them there.
The economics follow from the airframe. Precision AI puts its operating cost under $2.85 per acre, against roughly $6 to $13 for other drone approaches. That gap - not the sustainability story, however good it is - is the thing that gets a machine adopted on a working farm.
Founder and CEO Daniel McCann is a three-time startup founder with about 25 years in technology, which is a useful biography for a job that requires convincing farmers, aerospace engineers, and machine-learning researchers to work on the same object at once. His framing is characteristically flat: "Using artificial intelligence to target individual weeds is a quantum leap in efficiency and sustainability over today's practices." No adjectives to spare.
An autonomous aerial sprayer on a flexwing powered-paraglider airframe. 60- or 100-gallon tank, up to five hours of flight on gas, ~92 acres per hour, and onboard AI that sprays weeds and skips the crop - at under $2.85 an acre.
The perception and decision engine: deep-learning models that classify every plant in a field in real time, enabling green-on-green weed detection and plant-level spray decisions at broad-acre scale.
Field data captured in flight becomes plant-by-plant insight for farmers and agronomists - supporting input decisions, sustainability reporting, and supply-chain traceability.
Under conventional broad-acre spraying, the overwhelming majority of chemical never touches a weed. Precision AI's pitch is to close that gap.
The tell in Precision AI's cap table is who showed up for the Series A: farmer-owned cooperatives. When the people who sell inputs to farmers invest in a company that reduces input use, they are either hedging or they believe it. Either way it is a signal.
| Round | Amount | When | Notable Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | $20M equity + grants |
May 2021 | At One Ventures (Tom Chi), BDC Capital, Fulcrum Global Capital, Golden Opportunities Fund, Sustainable Development Technology Canada, Protein Industries Canada |
| Series A | Undisclosed | 2025 | Cooperative Ventures (CHS & GROWMARK), Farm Credit Canada, The 51 Food and AgTech Fund, Green Spark Ventures, Verdex AgriFund, plus existing backers |
Daniel McCann launches Precision.AI Inc. to bring computer vision and robotics to sustainable agriculture.
Co-led by At One Ventures and BDC Capital, with grant support from SDTC and Protein Industries Canada.
The AI vision platform advances through multi-season trials of autonomous spraying.
The flexwing powered-paraglider sprayer goes public - ~92 acres per hour, up to five hours aloft.
CHS, GROWMARK, Farm Credit Canada and Verdex AgriFund back the round ahead of commercial rollout.
It flies on a parachute. The Stratus AirSprayer's "flexwing" is a paraglider-style canopy, letting it carry heavier loads and stay up longer than a quadcopter.
Gas, not batteries. Up to five hours of flight before refueling - the opposite of most "green" drones, and deliberately so.
A Google X pedigree. Seed round co-lead At One Ventures was founded by Google X co-founder Tom Chi.
The logo is the thesis. Two leaves and a stem - a sprout - stands in for the whole plant-by-plant idea.
The co-ops came last. CHS and GROWMARK invested only after field trials proved out - traction before capital.
Broad-acre first. Precision AI calls it the world's first AI agriculture drone for plant-level decisions at broad-acre scale.