James Paterson & Benjamin Meltzer

James grew up on a farm outside of Cape Town, learning firsthand the challenges faced by his family and community of growers. Years later, at university, he met Benji and together they decided to see how they could use their combined skills in aeronautics and machine learning to find ways to solve the challenges faced by the agricultural sector. In the beginning, James and Benji brought together a team to assemble their own drones and fly them on James’ family farm. They were soon able to validate that they could use artificial intelligence to process aerial imagery, and identify problems invisible to the naked eye. Today, they have flown and generated insights for over one hundred million trees to help growers, investors and insurers improve their production and profitability. James Paterson & Benjamin Meltzer were recognised as the All Africa Innovator of the Year in 2018