Who knows what secrets await in the hearts of plants? Brightseed has found a couple of them, anyway, using an AI-based analysis method and will be bringing its first products to market soon with the help of a $68 million B round.
Brightseed’s thesis is simply that there are almost certainly some very helpful and healthy substances waiting in plants, which they call phytonutrients, that have yet to be either discovered or popularized. As many of our medicines and vitamins are plant-derived, it’s hardly a controversial idea — but how can you sort through the countless compounds that plants make and are made up of?
The company’s answer is Forager, a machine learning platform that identifies and categorizes plant compounds at a very fast clip; they’ve already mapped two …