
With startup Zordi, founder Gilwoo Lee's enthusiasm for robotics, healthy eating, better produce and sustainable farming has taken root.
Lee hadn't even finished her Ph.D. in AI and robotics at the University of Washington when investors seeded her ambitious plans for autonomous agriculture. Since researcher-turned-entrepreneur Lee founded Zordi in 2020 with Casey Call, formerly head grower at vertical farming startup Plenty, the robotic grower of strawberries has landed its fruits in Wegmans and is now expanding with partner farms in New Jersey and California.
The most rewarding part is that the fruits you get taste amazing, said Lee. You're able to consistently do that throughout the cycle of the plant because you are constantly optimizing.
The company has two types of robots within its hydroponic operations. One is a scouting robot for gathering information on the health of plants using foundational models. The other is a harvesting robot for delicately picking and placing fruits and handling other tasks.
Zordi, whose engineering team is based outside Boston, has farms in southern New Jersey and western New York. The company uses NVIDIA GPUs in the cloud and on desktops for training everything from crop health models to those for fruit picking and assessing fruit quality.
Lee aims to deploy autonomous greenhouse systems globally to support regional markets, cutting down on the carbon footprint for transportation as well as providing fresher, better-tasting fruits grown more sustainably.
Having operated greenhouses in New York and New Jersey for two years, the company recently formed partnerships with greenhouse farms in New Jersey and California to meet growing demand.
Zordi is bringing NVIDIA accelerated AI automation to indoor growing that in many ways is parallel to developments in manufacturing and fulfillment operations.
Adopting Jetson for Sustainable Farming, Energy Efficiency Zordi is building AI models and robots to enable sustainable farming at scale. It uses NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin modules for testing out gathering sensor data and running its models to recognize the health of plants, flowers and fruits, early pest and disease symptoms, and the needs for hydration and nutrition, as well as light and temperature management.
Jetson's energy efficiency and the availability of low-cost, high performance cameras from NVIDIA partners are attractive attributes for Zordi, said Lee. The company runs several cameras on each of its robots to collect data.
Jetson opens up a lot of lower-cost cameras, said Lee. It lets us play with different cameras and gives us better battery management.
With its scouting and harvesting robots, Zordi also aims to address a big issue farms worldwide complain about: a labor shortage that affects operations, leaving fruits and vegetables sometimes unattended and unharvested altogether.
Zordi is planning to scale up its growing operations to meet consumer demand. The company expects that it can do more with AI and robotic automation despite labor challenges.
We want our harvesting robots to do more dexterous tasks, like pruning leaves, with the help of simulation, said Lee.
Omniverse Isaac Sim and Digital Twins to Boost Operations Zordi is looking at how to boost its indoor growing operations with AI much like industrial manufacturers do, using Isaac Sim in Omniverse for simulations and digital twins to optimize operations.
The company's software platform for viewing all the data collected from its robots' sensors provides a live dashboard with a spatial map. It offers a real-time view of every plant in its facilities so that it's easy to monitor the production remotely.
What's more, it analyzes plant health and makes optional crop care recommendations using foundational models so that inexperienced farm operators can manage farms like experts.
We're literally one step away from putting this all into Isaac Sim and Omniverse, said Lee, whose Ph.D. dissertation covered reinforcement learning and sim-to-real.
Zordi is working on gripping simulations for strawberries as well as for cucumbers and tomatoes to expand into other categories.
With strawberries or any other crops, if you can handle them delicately, then it helps with longer shelf life, Lee said.
Lee is optimistic that the simulations in Isaac Sim will not only boost Zordi's performance in harvest, but also let it do other manipulation tasks in other scenarios.
Big picture, Zordi aims to create a fully autonomous farming system that makes farming easy and profitable, with AI recommending sustainable crop-care decisions and robots doing the hard work.
What's really important for us is how do we automate this, and how do we have a thinking AI that is actually making decisions for the farm with a lot of automations, said Lee.
Most recent headlines
11/12/2025
Dalet, a leading provider of cloud-native, end-to-end media workflow solutions, ...
26/11/2025
Following the Nov. 21 blackout of NBCUniversal channels on Fubo, the two sides have traded barbs about their inability to reach a new carriage deal....
26/11/2025
LONDON As TV sports rights become increasingly important for both broadcasters and streamers, Ampere Analysis predicts global investment in the genre will surpa...
26/11/2025
LOS ANGELES Vubiquity said it has achieved the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Media & Entertainment Competency as part of the AWS Partner Network (APN). This designa...
26/11/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission's Enforcement Bureau said it has entered into a consent decree with Comcast calling for the cable company t...
26/11/2025
Berklee Named to the Hollywood Reporters Top Music Schools List The publication highlights the college's screen scoring program, industry partnerships, and ...
25/11/2025
Tracy Bonareri Onchoke, an investigative journalist from Kenya is the winner of the Thomson Foundation's Young Journalist Award 2025.
The 26-year-old-sele...
25/11/2025
SVG All-Stars: Blayke Scheer, Senior Director, Creative Content, YES NetworkThe Indiana alum has turned storytelling into an artform for more than two decadesBy...
25/11/2025
Op-Ed: With FCC's C-Band Auction on the Horizon, Broadcasters Need Proven, C...
25/11/2025
Analysis: Is Baller League really the future of sport? By Callum McCarthy, Editor-at-Large
Tuesday, November 25, 2025 - 10:10
Print This Story
With KSI on...
25/11/2025
Platinum Whitepaper: The Growth of Broadcast in the World of Major Large Scale E...
25/11/2025
SVG Summit 2025 Preview: SVG Women's Sports WorkshopBy Samantha Gabay
Tuesday, November 25, 2025 - 10:27 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
Story Highlig...
25/11/2025
SVG New Sponsor Spotlight: CacheFly's Matt Levine on the Evolving Role of th...
25/11/2025
Peacock's EA SPORTS Madden NFL Cast Levels Up on Thanksgiving With SkyCam as...
25/11/2025
Mathias Broe attends the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of Sauna at Library Center Theatre. (Photo by Michael Hurcomb/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Fes...
25/11/2025
The best playlists, podcasts, and audiobooks bring a little extra magic to your daily routine. With new features and offerings, Spotify Premium delivers even mo...
25/11/2025
Comprehensive new research confirms what we already knew: Australian music fans love the quality, quantity, and access they have to new and local music on strea...
25/11/2025
Applicable Products
Objectives The purpose of this application note is to give a brief background on 5G (NR) wireless communication an explain the reason a SN...
25/11/2025
Nielsen will now measure both Lionsgate's FAST channel MovieSphere and Movie...
25/11/2025
FREMONT, Calif. Blackmagic Design said the Associated Press has completed the transition of its global video-editing platform to DaVinci Resolve Studio....
25/11/2025
Berklees Inaugural Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole Scholarship Awarded to Paris P...
25/11/2025
NEW YORK NFL and college football coverage, the MLB postseason and the new fall broadcast-TV season contributed to major gains for traditional media companies a...
25/11/2025
SAUGERTIES, N.Y. Tower Products, a manufacturer and distributor of pro video and audio equipment here, said President and CEO Jim Veltrie will retire from the c...
25/11/2025
Following last week's disclosure that it had acquired a 8.2% stake in E.W. Scripps, Sinclair has filed papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission pr...
25/11/2025
25 Nov 2025
VEON's QazCode and MeetKai Sign Agreement to Power National LLM...
25/11/2025
UKTV has acquired a high-profile slate of US dramas from Paramount Global Conten...
25/11/2025
A symphony of genius, rivalry and vengeance, boldly reimagined from Peter Shaffe...
25/11/2025
Article courtesy of Cinematography World
Read the article
FilmLight has finalised the prestigious 2025 FilmLight Colour Awards jury and welcomed award-winning...
25/11/2025
Article courtesy of Prensario
Read the article
La serie fue dirigida por Juli n de Tavira, Rodrigo Santos, y David Leche Ruiz, con direcci n de fotograf a a...
25/11/2025
Article courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter
Read the article
The awards, celebr...
25/11/2025
Article courtesy of Televisual
Read the article
Already live in Los Angeles and rolling out in New York and London, Nara gives producers, colourists, conform ...
25/11/2025
Article courtesy of Digital Media World
Read the article
ARTONE post-house in Tokyo is the first facility in Japan to integrate Baselight M, choosing its prec...
25/11/2025
Article courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter
Read the article
Once hidden in post-production suites, the artists who make movies and TV shows look the way they ...
25/11/2025
Article courtesy of Deadline
Read the article
The Brutalist' & Bad Bunny's Nuevayol' Music Video Among 2025 FilmLight Colour Award Winners - Cam...
25/11/2025
Black Forest Labs - the frontier AI research lab developing visual generative AI models - today released the FLUX.2 family of state-of-the-art image generation ...
24/11/2025
HBO's The Shuffle' Reveals Longtime Connection of Sports and Entertainm...
24/11/2025
2025 Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame: Hiroshi Kiriyama, Sony Broadcast (and Ind...
24/11/2025
SVG Summit 2025 Preview: FIFA, NBC Olympics, Fox Sports, CBS Sports, Netflix, NF...
24/11/2025
Case Study: YES Network Streamlines Broadcast Operations with Beam DynamicsBy SVG Staff
Monday, November 24, 2025 - 11:18 am
Print This Story | Subscribe
...
24/11/2025
Platinum White Paper: More of Everything: How Broadcasters are Changing Their Ap...
24/11/2025
Versant Media USA Sports President Matt Hong on How Versant Has Best of Both Wor...
24/11/2025
SVG Sit-Down: NABA Director-General Rebecca Hanson on How FCC's C-Band Aucti...
24/11/2025
SVG New Sponsor Spotlight: Bolin Technology's Sapan Doshi on the Proliferati...
24/11/2025
Robyn made her long-awaited return to the stage this week, as Spotify and Acne Studios brought friends and top fans together for an unforgettable evening at the...
24/11/2025
After more than two years of redevelopment, FC Barcelona returned to its spiritual home on November 22, hosting Athletic Club in the first La Liga match at the ...
24/11/2025
The L3Harris next-generation imager for NOAA's GeoXO satellite system will c...
24/11/2025
Mumbai - November 24, 2025 - In a first-of-its-kind initiative, JioStar, in coll...
24/11/2025
Disney Achieves Largest Monthly Share Increase, Followed by FOX and Paramount, w...
24/11/2025
ROCHESTER, N.Y. Sinclair said it has elevated Sean LaRose, director of sales at WUHF and partner station WHAM here, to vice president and general manager, effec...
24/11/2025
Back to All News
Chaos and Connection: Meet the Unfiltered Cast of Reality Dati...