Pitch Competition winner named at annual show

Verdi, Vancouver, British Columbia, was named the 2022 Pitch Competition winner at the 2022 Irrigation Show and Education Week in Las Vegas, Dec. 8.

The Verdi Platform provides variable rate irrigation for specialty crops, allowing growers to build, manage and scale precision agriculture systems by connecting software and hardware with the farm data layer.

Roman Kozak, co-founder and chief technology officer at Verdi says the project started as an academic project at the University of British Columbia.

“We reached out to GoogleX and asked them if they had a hard problem that we could help them work on for our capstone project,” says Kozak. “They replied and told us about an industry need ‘to do plant-level irrigation — this crazy idea of being able to give every plant a unique amount of water.'”

After six months of work, Verdi pitched their project to GoogleX and one of the world’s largest wine brands, and the company has continued to grow from there, says Kozak.

The Pitch Competition featured startup irrigation technology companies in both agriculture and landscape presenting their products in the Innovation Hub on the Irrigation Show floor. Eight irrigation startups gave presentations and were judged by a panel of expert judges evaluating the quality of their presentation, the product, market need and economic feasibility.

Verdi, along with the other companies participating in the Pitch Competition, was featured in a special Innovation Row section of the Irrigation Show exhibit hall during the conference.

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