James Paterson, the CEO of Cape Town agritech company Aerobotics, grew up on a fruit farm in Clanwilliam in the Western Cape. His path took him from the farm to MIT and back to farming, MyBroadband reported.
Aerobotics helps fruit producers forecast their harvests. It uses drone photos to measure the size, colour and quality of fruit. Since it was founded in 2014, the company has raised $27.1 million, or about R452 million, across five funding rounds.
“My dad was a fruit farmer. We grow citrus, avocados, and stone fruit in South Africa. That’s where the love of agriculture comes from,” Paterson told PostHarvest in an interview in April 2023.
His family bought the farm in 1989, when there was little on the land. They planted most of the orchards themselves.
In a video posted by Aerobotics, his father said James always followed him around while he worked. He said the boy often rode in tractor cabs during ploughing and regularly fell asleep there.
“It’s a great life. There’s a lot of freedom. We didn’t stress as long as the kids were back by dark,” his father said. He added that James had loved aircraft from a young age.
Paterson attended Bishops Diocesan College in Cape Town from 2002 and finished matric at the end of 2007. In 2008 he began a degree in mechatronics, robotics and automation engineering at the University of Cape Town.
He graduated with distinction in 2011. In 2012 he went to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to study for a master’s degree in aerospace engineering.
He finished that degree in 2014, also with distinction. He earned a perfect grade point average of 4.0, according to MyBroadband.
In September 2014, Paterson started Aerobotics with his friend Benji Meltzer, whom he described as an artificial intelligence expert. Paterson said the pair did not have a clear business idea at first.
“We didn’t quite know what we were going to do yet. We just started this thing, and then we actually presented to each other once an idea, and we settled on this,” he said.
He said they did not pick a problem first. Instead, they looked for problems they could solve with the technology they already knew.
“Drone technology was still very new then. We had to build everything ourselves. So we started building our own drones and camera systems,” Paterson told PostHarvest.
The two also wrote the software that flew their drones. Paterson said the team gave itself three months to build a demo. In that time they built the drones, the camera and the software.
He said the early days had their share of disasters. After flying over an orchard, he would sit there feeling stressed. He said the stress eased as the technology improved.
“Aerobotics started out really small. We’re really proud to see it go from a two-man show in the garage in Cape Town to what it is now,” his father said.
The family farm became the testing ground for the company’s technology, and Paterson’s father was its first customer. “He’s still a customer of ours,” Paterson said.
Source: this article is based on reporting by MyBroadband. Image: MyBroadband. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Technology desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Werner Jacobs covers technology for Tzaneen Voice. Werner reports on mobile networks, data prices, internet access, smartphones, apps, AI, cybersecurity and South African tech companies. Each story explains what a new product, price change or policy means for ordinary users in South Africa.