How the Agriculture Industry Is Going Electric – with Arun Seelam

We live in the data mining age, where tracking data has become a very valuable currency. Many industries are growing to adopt more technologies that can help them track progress and productivity. Since the boom of popularity with Smart Agriculture growing to a $13.1B industry in 2020, the opportunity to build new products becomes more obvious.

We see companies like Texas Instruments (Yes, the company that makes your calculators that you failed math with), that develops drones that collect real time data on soil moisture, humidity, and crop maturity. AGCO Corporation makes the tractors, planters, and smart farming applications. But the Light Utility Vehicle space has a lot of opportunity to grow! Right now, companies like Alke have developed an Electric Utility Vehicle that leads the space in zero carbon emmissions! They've pioneered e-mobility space and have been selling 40 countries world-wide!

These technologies have empowered the rural farmers and the agricultural community to scale their business!

Boson Motors, e-L.U.V.

We met with one of the entrepreneurs that is trying to fundamentally revolutionize the transportation space within the industry. Arun Seelam founded Boson Motors, a company that created the first all-electric and intelligent Light Commercial Vehicle (LCV) or Light Utility Vehicle (L.U.V.). Farmers in these rural areas use LCV's to deliver payload and fulfill supply chain needs. Maybe it doesn't go 0-60 in 2.3 seconds, but it can deliver payloads of up to 1600 lbs and can run for 80 miles. But how is it intelligent? Glad you asked.

Big Android with Wheels

It is called the LP20. The truck is not only electric, but it can also track metrics. Within transporatation, drive length, GPS, and productivity per mile are very important metrics. With the LP20, farmers will be able to track these and make data-driven decisions. Arun had designed this to be a completely open source vehicle that can give programmers access to create applications with an android environment.

“Think of this as a remote-controlled car that you can run apps to. A simple vehicle that can be programmed to do a variety of things, and most importantly, the programming is on Android. So anybody can practically develop an app and anybody can download an app to run on these vehicles. It’s basically a big Android phone on wheels."

— Arun Seelam

Arun Seelam

Arun is an ex-Googler with a ton of database experience. Despite being a software engineer, he learned how to build the electric vehicle through bootstrapping and iterating (He talks about his first electric vehicle venture on the show!). He grew up in rural India, where he actually comes from a family of truckers. He founded Boson with Suri Bhupatiraju, also an ex-Googler, who now is the Chief Operating Officer.

Check it out and learn how Arun and Suri are planning to disrupt the LCV Market ($20BN)!