Jorge Heraud

Who He Is

Jorge Heraud spent about 15 years at Trimble, a company that builds GPS and guidance systems, working mostly on precision agriculture and rising to lead engineering and then business development. He went back to Stanford University for a business degree and, in a class on starting companies, teamed up with Lee Redden, a robotics PhD student who had grown up on a Nebraska farm. In 2011 they founded Blue River Technology around a bold question: what if a machine could look at every single plant in a field and decide, one by one, what to do with it? Their first product, a lettuce-thinning machine, used cameras and machine learning to tell crop plants from weeds and from each other, and within a few years it was working more than 10 percent of the lettuce grown in the United States. Their next idea, See & Spray, put the same approach on crop sprayers so herbicide would land only on weeds instead of the entire field. John Deere bought Blue River in 2017 for $305 million, and See & Spray is now sold on the company’s sprayers.

Why He Matters

Heraud and his team proved that artificial intelligence could work in a dusty field at 15 miles per hour, not just in a lab. In the 2025 growing season, farmers ran See & Spray across more than five million acres and cut their use of certain herbicides by nearly half, saving roughly 31 million gallons of spray mix. For a precision agriculture technician, that shift changes the job: instead of managing a field in zones, the newest tools manage it plant by plant, and someone has to set up, calibrate, and check the cameras and software that make those decisions. His path, from guidance-system engineer to startup founder to part of a major equipment company, also shows how closely the technology side of agriculture is now tied to the farm itself. He represents the frontier of the career, where cameras, computing, and crops meet.