Blue River Named to Top 25 Most Disruptive Companies of 2017 by Inc.

Blue River was recently named to Inc.'s list of most disruptive companies of 2017. "'Disruptive' may be a trendy word in startup pitches, but Inc. doesn't throw around the term lightly. To qualify for Inc.'s list, founders needed groundbreaking ideas--and ambitious plans for bringing them to market."

Blue River was lauded specifically for its technology's ability to cut chemical usage for farmers by 90%.

"Blue River Technology has spent five years figuring out how best to apply cutting-edge computing "vision" to the realm of agriculture. The company makes machines that let farmers target individual plants with herbicides, which eliminates the need to spray whole fields all at once, reduces the spread on chemicals, and helps maximize seed yield. Blue River says that its devices are capable of reducing by up to 90 percent the chemicals farmers use, and that they are currently operating on 10 percent of the lettuce grown in the U.S.

Blue River likens its go-to-market strategy to Tesla's method of focusing on the high end of the market first. The company is starting with high-value, high-maintenance crops like lettuce and cotton; by 2018 the team plans to address the "mass market" of corn, soybeans, and wheat. The analogy doesn't stop there—Blue River also uses some of the same tech inside self-driving cars, especially when it comes to processing images so that the company's machines can "see" plants. "