Two engineering students built a robot that zaps weeds with lasers instead of spraying them
Harvested Robotics' tractor-mounted weeder uses AI to spot weeds and lasers to kill them, cutting the cost and the chemicals of Indian farming.
Weeding is one of the highest hidden costs in Indian farming. By the founder's estimate, a farmer can spend around Rs 15,000 each time, three or four times a season, and the cheaper option, spraying chemical herbicides, harms the soil and the people doing the spraying.
According to the ICAR-Directorate of Weed Research, a government body, weeds cost Indian agriculture an estimated $11 billion a year.
, a Hyderabad startup, offers a third option: a robot that burns weeds with lasers, leaving both the crop and the soil chemistry untouched.
Each usual fix carries a cost. Hand-weeding is expensive and increasingly hard to staff; herbicides are cheaper but build up in the soil and reach the farmers who apply them. The startup is betting that a machine can be both cheaper and cleaner.
The company was started in 2023 by Rahul Arepaka and George Mathew, two engineers who built the first version in their college hostel at Mahindra University in Hyderabad. Arepaka had been building farming robots for competitions, including the World Robotics Olympiad, when he settled on weeds as the problem worth solving.
Cameras find the weeds, lasers burn them
Their machine, RAKSHAK, mounts on a tractor and is powered by its battery. Cameras and computer-vision models spot weeds as the tractor moves, and robotic actuators fire high-power lasers to destroy them without touching the crop. The company reports a 90% weed-detection rate and five-millimetre tracking accuracy.
Left unchecked, weeds compete with crops for water, light and nutrients, and the timing of removal matters as much as the method. A machine that can run whenever needed, without hiring a crew or mixing chemicals, changes that calculation for a farmer.
The appeal is that it removes both the labour and the chemicals from weeding, in a form that fits equipment farmers already own. The team has been tuning the system with more weed cases so it can work across different crops. Laser weeding is not unique to Harvested Robotics; a few companies abroad, most visibly in the United States, build similar machines. Its pitch is a version built and priced for Indian farms, designed to bolt onto tractors that farmers already run.
Selling through dealers, backed by Mahindra
Harvested Robotics plans to sell through dealers rather than directly to farmers, with dealerships selling or renting the machines and the company supplying spare parts and warranties. It says a few hundred farmers have registered interest, and it has run pilots ahead of a wider rollout.
The company built everything in-house with a small team, running field pilots to tune the system for local weeds and crops before selling at scale.
In early 2025, it raised Rs 5 crore in a seed round led by Arali Ventures, with Mahindra Group chairman Anand Mahindra and Country Delight co-founder Chakradhar Gade taking part, on top of earlier grants including one from the Kerala Startup Mission. The money is going into finishing the product, running more pilots and growing the team.
Revenue is minimal as the product moves from pilots toward commercial sale. The founders' pitch is simple: cut the cost of weeding by roughly half, and take the chemicals out of the field entirely.
(This story has been researched and compiled using publicly available information.)