Grégoire Hummel (Phenospex):
Towards digital agriculture

Grégoire earned his PhD at two of the world’s leading plant science and plant phenotyping institutes: the Research Center Jülich and Max Planck Institute Jena. Working in an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists and physicists, Grégoire co-developed several methods for the automated, non-invasive assessment of crops. After completing his PhD, he collaborated with growers on a European project exploring remote sensing technologies to improve crop management. Grégoire identified a major need for the automated assessment of crops in the marketplace, which later became the framework for Phenospex products.

We believe that digitalization will be the major driver in the process to reduce the impact of farming on our planet. That is why we develop sensors and data analytics to capture crops and transfer this data into actionable information. Our core technologies at Phenospex are a multispectral 3D sensor PlantEye to capture plants, a data analysis engine called Phena that extracts features from the raw data in real time and software that allows our clients to translate those features into plant traits and actionable information. Our technologies and solutions are used worldwide to automate routine phenotyping jobs of plant scientists and breeders, supports R&D in their product development and is included in robotics like our automated field lettuce harvester.