# Vishnu Jayaprakash

> Vishnu Jayaprakash is the CEO and co-founder of AgZen, an MIT spinout that puts cameras and AI on crop sprayers so farmers can see, for the first time, where their pesticide droplets actually land. He grew up spraying rice and mangoes by hand on his family's farm near Chennai, spent more than a decade at MIT studying how droplets cling to leaves, and turned that physics into a business that went from zero paid acres to nearly a million in two years. His pitch is blunt: agriculture has sprayed at scale for 80 years without ever measuring whether the chemical reached the plant.

- **Role:** CEO & Co-Founder at AgZen
- **Organizations:** AgZen, MIT
- **From:** Chennai, India
- **Nationality:** Indian
- **Education:** Bachelor's, Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, SM, Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, PhD, Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- **Known for:** Co-founded and leads AgZen, scaling from zero paid acres in 2023 to roughly 920,000-970,000 acres in 2025, Developed RealCoverage, a bolt-on camera-and-AI system that measures spray coverage in real time and detects droplets as small as 150 microns, Co-developed EnhanceCoverage / AgZen-Cloak nozzle technology that cloaks droplets with plant-derived adjuvants to cut bounce-off

## Career timeline

- **2020** — Co-founded AgZen with MIT Professor Kripa Varanasi as a Boston-area MIT spinout
- **2022** — Completed PhD at MIT on droplet behavior on leaves and spray efficiency; AgZen raised $3M seed led by Material Impact
- **2024** — AgZen reached 65,000 paid acres in its first commercial year
- **2025** — Scaled to nearly one million acres; closed $10M Series A; partnered with Corteva to evaluate RealCoverage

## Achievements

- Co-founded and leads AgZen, scaling from zero paid acres in 2023 to roughly 920,000-970,000 acres in 2025
- Developed RealCoverage, a bolt-on camera-and-AI system that measures spray coverage in real time and detects droplets as small as 150 microns
- Co-developed EnhanceCoverage / AgZen-Cloak nozzle technology that cloaks droplets with plant-derived adjuvants to cut bounce-off
- Validated 30-50% reductions in chemical inputs in university and field trials
- Won first place (graduate category) at the Collegiate Inventors Competition, National Inventors Hall of Fame
- Won first prize in the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab World Food Day student video competition
- Secured a partnership with Corteva to evaluate spray efficiency across its crop protection portfolio (2025)

## Latest updates

- **2025-10** — AgZen announced a partnership with Corteva to lab- and field-test RealCoverage across Corteva's crop protection portfolio.
- **2025-12** — AgZen scaled to roughly 920,000-970,000 leased or purchased acres in its second commercial year.
- **2026-02** — AgZen's latest funding round (listed as Series B, $10M) recorded; total funding reported around $23.65M.

## Links

- Website: https://agzen.com
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/vishnu-jayaprakash
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/thevishnujp

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/vishnu-jayaprakash
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-04