Charlie Wu

He studied computer science at Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote in 2025 that the idea of applying technology to agriculture came to him while he was a student there; it quotes him as saying, “I got to meet fruit professors who are the best in the world at what they do,” and relates that through those conversations he learned that even the largest farms in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry basically have no idea what is actually growing in their fields.⁠[1][2]

The investor Contrary wrote in a March 2024 post that he had a personal history of robotics research and attended Cornell specifically to explore the intersection of agriculture and robotics.⁠[3]

In 2022 he founded Orchard Robotics at Cornell University, a company that uses cameras and AI to help fruit growers manage their crops more precisely.⁠[4][1][5][6]

He dropped out of Cornell. Contrary’s post states that he left once he had decided that building a company was the more appropriate path; GeekWire writes that he dropped out of Cornell University to start the business.⁠[3][7][1]

On March 20, 2024, the Thiel Foundation announced the 20 members of the 2024 class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry; he was fifth on the list, which gives his hometown as Fairfax, VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry. The announcement describes his project in these terms: Orchard Robotics is putting eyes on each of the billions of fruit in orchards and using AI to help farmers feed the world with the best food they have ever grown. It states that the Thiel Fellowship, established in 2011, provides each fellow with $100,000 and access to a network of tech founders, investors, scientists and former fellows, and that fellows commit to focusing full-time on their projects, companies or ideas.⁠[8]

Orchard Robotics’ news release at the end of March 2024 quoted Alex Handy, director of the Thiel Fellowship, on him: “Charlie is paving the way for a future where farmers will be truly omniscient.” The Packer wrote that the program provides $100,000 over two years to young entrepreneurs.⁠[9][10][11]

On March 27, 2024, TechCrunch published the news that Orchard Robotics had raised a $3.2 million seed round led by General CatalystGeneral CatalystGeneral Catalyst (GC) is an investment firm founded in 2000 and headquartered in San Francisco, United States, created by Joel Cutler, David Fialkow and Bill Fitzgerald, that backs companies from the seed stage through growth.Open the full entry, with Humba Ventures, Soma Capital, Correlation Ventures, VU Venture Partners and Genius Ventures participating; the round followed a previously unannounced $600,000 pre-seed. Contrary wrote in a post the same day that it had led the pre-seed and that the two rounds came to $3.8 million.⁠[4][3]

Fruit Growers News gives Genius Ventures as Ben Taft’s Genius Ventures and lists the angel investors Howard Lerman, Joshua BrowderJoshua BrowderJoshua Browder is an entrepreneur and venture investor who founded the consumer-rights service DoNotPay in 2015 and leads it as chief executive; the service was once promoted as “the world’s first robot lawyer.” He was selected as a Thiel Fellow in 2018 and launched the venture fund Browder Capital. In September 2024 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) brought an administrative complaint over DoNotPay’s “AI lawyer” claims; DoNotPay agreed to settle, and the final order was issued in January 2025.Open the full entry, Rory O’Reilly and Kieran O’Reilly.⁠[10][11]

TechCrunch’s article states that the company was based in Seattle and started with apple crops: its cameras can capture up to 100 images per second and record every tree they pass, and software called Orchard OS uses AI to map each bud and fruit, their distribution and the color of the apples. It identifies him as founder and chief executive and quotes him as saying that the cameras image trees “from bud to bloom to harvest,” whereas traditional methods rely on “manually collected samples of maybe 100 fruits.”⁠[4]

In the news release he said, “Growing better fruit begins with knowing what you’re growing”; of the FruitScope OS software platform he said, “We recognize that data is only useful if our farmers can actually use it.” AgTechNavigator quoted his statement of the company’s mission: “Our mission at Orchard Robotics is to help farmers produce more food for the world.”⁠[10][11]

Niko Bonatsos, managing director, and Max Rimpel, partner, at General Catalyst said in the release: “Orchard Robotics has a bold vision to transform the future of farming.” The release states that the funding followed a successful 2023 growing season and would be used to scale the team and operations to cover larger acreages.⁠[11][10]

On September 3, 2025, Orchard Robotics announced an oversubscribed $22 million Series A led by Quiet Capital and Shine CapitalShine CapitalShine Capital is a U.S. early-stage venture-capital firm founded in 2020 by Mo Koyfman, with offices in New York and San Francisco. It invests at company formation, seed and Series A stages and provides follow-on capital, across areas including technology, consumer businesses and finance.Open the full entry, with continued participation from General Catalyst, Contrary, Mythos, Valyrian, Ravelin, the F1 world champion Nico Rosberg, and Howard Lerman, founder of Yext and Roam; the company’s total funding passed $25 million. Michael Bloch, a partner at Quiet Capital, joined the company’s board.⁠[6][1][5]

In the release he said, “Agriculture hasn’t fundamentally evolved in the last 20 years,” and “Solving farming is a data problem.” The release states that large farms rely on manual sampling that covers less than 0.01% of their crop to make multi-million-dollar decisions.⁠[6][5]

The release describes the company’s first product as an operating system for precision crop management with two parts: the FruitScope Vision System, an AI camera system that mounts on any tractor or farm vehicle, and FruitScope Vault & OS, which records plant growth, health and yield. It states that the technology was deployed across many of America’s leading apple and grape farms and had recently expanded into blueberries, cherries, almonds, pistachios, citrus and strawberries, and that the company planned to double its team by the end of the year and open a new office in San Francisco.⁠[6][1]

GeekWire wrote that Orchard Robotics was based in San Francisco with an office in Seattle, and that he split his time between the two cities.⁠[7]

TechCrunch’s article of the same day sets down several of his statements: that the existing market for fruit and vegetable data is about $1.5 billion, and that he hopes Orchard’s path will resemble that of Flock SafetyFlock SafetyFlock Safety is a public safety technology company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, founded in 2017 by Garrett Langley and others. Its main business is automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras and a vehicle data network that law enforcement agencies can query across jurisdictions, and it also offers gunshot detection, video, drones, and other products. Its camera network has expanded rapidly in the United States and has drawn controversy over privacy, data sharing, and uses related to immigration enforcement.Open the full entry, which over the previous eight years expanded from collecting license plate data to products such as gunshot detection and video surveillance and which the article gives as valued at $7.5 billion. He said, “If you don’t know what you’re growing in the field, you don’t know how much chemical to apply to it,” and “Our ambition is to be a lot more than just collecting data,” describing a plan to collect data, build an operating system on top of it and eventually own all farm workflows.⁠[1]

On September 22, 2025, The Packer published an article on him and Orchard Robotics that quotes him. He hoped to use the Series A money to keep expanding the data collected so as to help growers better in the future; of the company’s mission he said, “Our mission is just to help as many of our farmers as we can.” He said that the cameras capture far more data than the company currently extracts, of which it has probably touched only 10% or 20%.⁠[2]

The article states that he had expanded offices in Washington StateWashington (state)Washington is a state on the Pacific coast of the northwestern United States; its capital is Olympia and its largest city is Seattle. Washington was admitted to the Union on November 11, 1889, as the 42nd state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 7,705,281 residents.Open the full entry and CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry. He said, “Our camera systems are able to basically capture anything the human eye can see,” and that the data can be had “down to the tree-by-tree level.”⁠[2]

On April 15, 2026, GeekWire named him, as Charles Wu, one of five finalists for Young Entrepreneur of the Year at the GeekWire Awards; the other four were Emily Choi-Greene of Clearly AI, Caleb John of Pioneer Square Labs, Kavian Mojabe of MediScan AI and Zheqing (Bill) Zhu of Pokee AI. The article states that the 2026 GeekWire Awards were to take place on May 7 at the Showbox SoDo in Seattle, with voting open through April 16.⁠[12]

GeekWire’s list of winners, published on May 8, 2026, shows that Young Entrepreneur of the Year went to Bill Zhu, chief executive of Pokee AI, and names him among the finalists in the category.⁠[13]

An article published by AgFunderNews on September 2, 2026 relates that he spoke on stage, as founder and chief executive of Orchard Robotics, at Ruggedize, an agricultural robotics conference held at Reservoir Farms in Salinas. He said, “A million numbers in a spreadsheet is not a product,” and “Your average grower does not want to be, nor should they be, a data analyst.”⁠[14]

At the conference he said that the company had “hundreds of systems in the field” scanning tens of thousands of acres, with the aim of reaching hundreds of thousands; that most customers were in the United States; and that the company was seeing “some pretty tremendous pull internationally.” Growth over the previous few years, he said, had been “multiple times year over year.”⁠[14]

He said that Orchard does not sell on a promise of higher yields but on savings in labor and inputs and on supply-chain efficiency: “the biggest ROI is through reduction on labor and inputs,” and growers who realize those savings in full can see “anywhere from three to 10x ROI” in the first year. Yields, he added, can be predicted “with 95% accuracy or beyond.”⁠[14]

He described the camera system as “about the size of a large tissue box” and weighing about five pounds; images are processed on an onboard NVIDIANVIDIANVIDIA is an American semiconductor and computing technology company that provides graphics processing units, artificial intelligence infrastructure, networking interconnects, and computing software, and is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker NVDA.Open the full entry Jetson computer. Growers scan at different frequencies, the average being “around ten-ish times in a season.” The company charges a subscription per acre per year that includes the software platform, unlimited scans and access to the hardware, with hardware upgrades free; growers can hold the camera and scan for themselves or have Orchard’s technicians scan for them.⁠[14]

The crops he listed at the conference were apples, wine grapes, table grapes, cherries, blueberries, almonds, pistachios and citrus, with pomegranates, coffee and strawberries as new crops.⁠[14]

TechCrunch wrote that his grandparents were apple farmers in China and that this inspired his idea of applying technology to agriculture. The Packer’s article has him saying that he grew up in a farming family; Contrary’s post speaks of his family background in agriculture.⁠[1][2][3]

Orchard Robotics: Official website: https://www.orchard.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]