Deere & Company (NYSE:DE) has added seven companies to its 2022 Startup Collaborator program. John Deere launched the program in 2019 to enhance and deepen its interaction with startup companies whose technology could add value for customers.

- The year-long program enables John Deere and selected startup companies to test innovative technologies with customers and dealers without a more formal business relationship.

"The startup collaborator shows that part of our investment in technology is establishing a mechanism to help external ideas and knowledge collide with ours," said Julian Sanchez, director, emerging technology for John Deere. "Agriculture is a domain ripe for technology pioneering, and the startup collaborator program is a way to travel that journey together with others."

The seven companies John Deere added to the program include:

• Burro – A company providing people-scale robotic platforms to help farm laborers work more productively today, while laying the base for comprehensive automation of the most labor-intensive on-farm tasks tomorrow.
• CropZone.com – Crop.Zone is the electrifying solution available to every grower looking for a sustainable and reliable solution to control weeds and desiccate crops without residue.
• Four Growers – A company providing robotic harvesting and analytics for high-value crops - starting with greenhouse tomatoes.
• SeeDevice – A company working to provide enhanced CMOS SWIR image sensing capabilities and performance, using quantum-based photodetector technology for smart devices in automotive, biomedical, and machine vision applications.
• Ucropit – A company bringing together farmers and companies to create, aggregate and share Crop Stories™ with verified sustainability traceability.
• ViewAR – A company with more than 10 years of experience in creating Augmented Reality (AR) business solutions which address many customer pain points and use cases, like indoor navigation and AR for service, and allows them to easily create their own high-quality AR-Apps and start their augmented reality journey.
• Yard Stick - A company developing low-cost, instant, in situ soil carbon measurement technologies to enable gigaton/year carbon removal via agriculture.

The Startup Collaborator is a year-long program providing flexibility for John Deere and startup companies to test innovative technologies with customers and dealers without a formal business relationship. Startups also gain affiliation with and mentoring from a world-class leader in technology for agricultural and construction equipment.

"The expansion of this year's collaborator program provides an opportunity for John Deere to work with this globally diverse group across a broad area of technology spaces while continuing to unlock value for our customers across multiple production systems," said Michele Kaiser, business development manager for John Deere.