The problem is simple enough to see in any home kitchen: a brown banana, a soft avocado, a bag of forgotten limes. The cost, however, is measured in billions. See Produce, a two-year-old startup from Huntsville, is betting that a single smartphone photo can provide a better answer than a guess or a printed date. Its AI-powered computer vision platform aims to assess produce quality and predict shelf life, a wedge into the massive and fragmented challenge of food waste.
For an early-stage company, the playbook is pragmatic. It starts with a consumer app, Kitchen SensAI, which scans items like avocados and bananas to give users a ripeness score and a predicted expiry date. The subscription is priced at a familiar $2.99 per month. But the real procurement cycle, and the larger check size, sits further up the supply chain with grocery operators and distributors. That's where See Produce is now placing its chips, using a pilot with a European supermarket chain as its first proof point for the enterprise sale.
The dual-market wedge
See Produce's strategy is a classic two-sided approach. On one side, the B2C app serves as a product development lab and a channel for brand awareness. It handles instant quality checks, pantry digitization, and even monitors FDA recall alerts [See Produce]. On the other, the B2B platform is built for scale, offering APIs and tools for retailers to forecast shelf life, manage inventory, and optimize dynamic pricing to reduce spoilage [ZoomInfo.com, 2025].
The technical premise is that a trained model can extract more accurate freshness signals from an image than a static "best by" label or a manual inspection. The company claims its AI can assess ripeness and predict expiration from a single picture, starting with a handful of high-waste items like tomatoes and chilis, with more in development [Hypepotamus, May 2025]. This core capability is then packaged differently for each customer segment.
Traction through a supermarket pilot
The most concrete signal of early enterprise interest is a pilot deployment. See Produce is running a test with the Hoogvliet supermarket chain in the Netherlands, a validation that moves the company beyond consumer app downloads and into a real operational environment [gener8tor, 2026]. For a seed-stage agtech startup, landing a named grocery partner is a critical milestone. It provides a live dataset, operational feedback, and a case study that speaks directly to other budget owners in grocery operations and supply chain management.
The company's disclosed funding is modest, anchored by a $100,000 accelerator investment from gener8tor in late 2024 [Caplight, Oct 2024]. This capital appears to be funding the build-out of both product lines and the pursuit of these initial commercial pilots. The team remains small, reported at between one and ten employees [LinkedIn].
| Role | Name | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Co-Founder & CEO | Pandian Rajaram | Mobile developer with iOS/Android experience; studied at California State University-Los Angeles [LinkedIn, 2026]. |
| Co-Founder & President | Priyanka Kumari | Machine Learning Engineer with a master's in Computer Science; expertise in computer vision, NLP, and LLMs [LinkedIn, 2026][Labellerr, 2026]. |
The focus question
A dual B2C and B2B strategy offers potential diversification, but it also presents a classic resource-allocation challenge for a small team. The consumer app requires marketing, user acquisition, and support tuned for individual subscribers. The enterprise sale demands a different motion: longer sales cycles, integration work, and customer success focused on operational KPIs like waste reduction and inventory turnover.
The company's answer, for now, seems to be using the B2C app as a wedge and a demonstrator, while directing business development efforts toward specific commercial verticals. They are reportedly exploring opportunities with governmental bodies like the USDA and specific agricultural sectors, including peanuts and apples [Hypepotamus, May 2025]. This suggests a focus on high-value, repeatable inspection use cases beyond the general grocery aisle.
- Technical validation. The accuracy of shelf-life predictions across diverse produce types, lighting conditions, and supply chain stages remains a core technical hurdle. Consistent performance is the foundation of the value proposition.
- Economic proof. For grocery chains, the ROI must clearly outweigh the cost of integration and change management. The pilot needs to translate into hard numbers on waste reduction and margin improvement.
- Scale and focus. The team must decide where to concentrate engineering and sales resources as demand grows. Prioritizing the higher-ACV enterprise path likely means the consumer app becomes a supporting actor.
The next twelve months
The immediate roadmap will be defined by the outcome of the Hoogvliet pilot. Success there would logically trigger a push to sign additional grocery chains, likely in North America, and a corresponding seed extension or Series A round to fund a dedicated sales effort. The company's exploration of agricultural sector partnerships, like automated peanut grading, points to another potential beachhead market with its own procurement cycle and budget owners.
For enterprise buyers, the ideal customer profile is a mid-sized to large grocery retailer or fresh produce distributor with a publicly stated sustainability goal and a operations team feeling the pain of shrink. They are the budget owners for inventory management systems. The realistic competitive set isn't other AI ripeness apps, but rather incumbent inventory management software, manual inspection processes, and the inertia of the status quo. See Produce's bet is that its focused, image-based intelligence can prove a cheaper and more accurate alternative to the waste baked into the current system.
Sources
- [See Produce] AI Grocery Assistant - Produce Quality Checks & FDA Recall Alerts | https://seeproduce.com/homeB2C
- [Hypepotamus, May 2025] If you've ever thrown away an overripe banana, you need this app created by Alabama entrepreneurs | https://www.hypepotamus.com/see-produce-ai-food-waste-startup/
- [ZoomInfo.com, 2025] See Produce company profile | https://www.zoominfo.com/c/see-produce/586283189
- [gener8tor, 2026] See Produce cohort announcement | https://www.gener8tor.com/accelerator/portfolio/see-produce
- [Caplight, Oct 2024] See Produce funding profile | https://caplight.com/company/see-produce
- [LinkedIn] See Produce company page | https://www.linkedin.com/company/seeproduce
- [LinkedIn, 2026] Pandian Rajaram profile | https://www.linkedin.com/in/pandian-rajaram-313240b7/
- [LinkedIn, 2026] Priyanka Kumari profile | https://www.linkedin.com/in/priyanka-kumari-9b0b78a5/
- [Labellerr, 2026] Priyanka Kumari author profile | https://www.labellerr.com/blog/author/priyanka/