AIForceTech, a Chinese startup that makes smart farm equipment, has raised tens of millions of yuan in a Series A+ round headed by China Creation Ventures, a Chinese venture capital firm.

Vertex Venture and Delian Capital, two of the company's shareholders, also put money in. Together with funds raised in a Series A round in June of last year, AIForceTech has raised more than 100 million yuan ($15.8 million). AIForceTech, which was founded in 2019, provides unmanned farm equipment and farmworker services to boost production and alleviate labor shortages.

What brings the need for autonomous machines?

Urbanization has begun to pose a unique challenge in China. As the nation's population migrates to more and more urbanized areas, the lack of labor in the rural areas has been decreasing. This might be a bit of an irony- the country that provides cheap labor is facing a shortage in its own fields. According to the seventh national census held in 2020, the country's urbanization percentage was 63.9 percent. According to some estimates, the rate could reach 75 to 80 percent by 2035. This is where the appeal of autonomous vehicles is beginning to fit in.

Several AIForceTech products have already been released to large agricultural producers as well as individual farms. Tsinghua University in China, the University of California in the United States, and Waseda University in Japan are among the universities where the company's top 40 engineers are from. The company has an interesting product currently treading the market. Its' Virtual Driver is the new unmanned product that has been creating some serious buzz in the market.

Virtual Driver-equipped tractors can do cultivation, leveling, planting, weeding, pesticide spraying, and other labor-intensive chores 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The weeding function can drastically reduce pesticide usage. Previously, the efficiency of manual agricultural work was heavily reliant on the competence of farm machinery operators. AIForceTech's goal is to assemble the knowledge of professional workers in order to develop computer systems that will allow autonomous farm equipment to match — or even outperform — manned tractor drivers.

This new advent in agriculture is exciting- where will man go next when his food production is also done by machines?