Aigen

Aigen is a robotics company founded in 2020 in Seattle by Rich Wurden and Kenny Lee, formerly of Tesla and Proofpoint, to remove weeds from row crops without herbicides or diesel-powered tractors.

Its Element robots run on solar panels and onboard AI needing only about 1.5 watts of compute power, mechanically striking weeds as they roam fields up to 14 hours a day and relaying crop and field data over a mesh network to a farmer-facing app; the service is sold to US commodity growers, including a 2025 deployment with Bowles Farming in California cotton fields.

1. Element robot: Solar-powered autonomous unit that mechanically strikes weeds.

2. Onboard AI: Low-power vision system identifying weeds among crop rows in real time.

3. Mesh network: Robots share field and crop data across the fleet as they work.

4. Chemical-free control: Mechanical weeding replaces herbicide passes on treated acres.

5. Robot-as-a-service: Sold as a seasonal service rather than a one-time purchase.

6. Field data feed: Crop images and status relayed to a grower-facing mobile app.