AgScout began with a simple question about the future of vineyards at the leading agricultural university in the United States.

During a UC Davis wine executive program, Professor Mason Earles was presenting how computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics, and plant-level data could transform modern farming.

In the session, co-founder Kia Behnia asked Mason a direct question:

“What is the best sensor on the farm?”

Mason answered without hesitation:

“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 scarcer, operating costs rise, and climate pressure increases.

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

Mason’s UC Davis lab had already developed an early Scout prototype 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 would be software-first and hardware agnostic.

That means growers can capture intelligence from the tools, vehicles, tractors, cameras, and autonomous platforms that already fit their operations.

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