Scout began with a conversation about the future of vineyards at the top agricultural university in the United States.

At a UC Davis wine executive program, Professor Mason Earles was presenting on how computer vision, AI, robotics, and plant-level data could transform farming. During the session, co-founder Kia Behnia asked Mason a simple question:

“What is the best sensor on the farm?”

Without hesitation, Mason answered:

“The farmer’s eye.”

That insight became the foundation for AgScout. The most valuable agricultural intelligence already exists in the field — in what experienced growers, viticulturists, and farmworkers see every day. The challenge is that human observation is difficult to scale across every zone, block, row, and plant, especially as labor becomes more scarce, costs rise, and climate pressure increases.

To manage spatial variability, farmers need to see and act at the plant level.

Mason’s UC Davis lab had already developed an early prototype of Scout using custom hardware to capture and analyze vineyard imagery. After spinning the technology out of UC Davis, the founding team made a critical decision: Scout should be software-first and hardware agnostic, so growers could capture data from the tools, vehicles, tractors, cameras, and autonomous platforms that fit their operation.

Today, Scout AMP is being adopted by some of the most prestigious brands in U.S. winegrowing. Scout delivers scalable precision today while building the data foundation for the next generation of agriculture.