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Narendhiran Saravanane (https://naren200.github.io) - whose name didn’t pop up when I searched for it here on TSE - was a summer intern with BrainChip last year (from May to August 2023), while enrolled for a Master’s program at Arizona State University, which has been part of our company’s University AI Accelerator Program since its inauguration in September 2022.
After graduating in April of this year with an “MS in Robotics and Autonomous Systems (Honors)”, he worked for a company called Padma AgRobotics for six months - so until very recently (his CV is not quite as up-to-date as his LinkedIn and GitHub profiles in that respect).
Padma AgRobotics is a five-year old startup based in Chandler, AZ and very much intertwined with Arizona State University (ASU): Not only is its founder, Raghu Nandivada, an ASU alumni, but equally robotics engineer Cole Brauer, who had joined the then one-month old company in January 2020 and only left the start-up in July of this year and is now self-employed.
In May 2020, Padma AgRobotics won US$15,000 for their invention of weed-killing robots in the ASU-backed Sarsam Family Venture Challenge, and earlier this year Raghu Nandivada was featured in a fireside chat with Cultivate PHX, an AgriFood Tech Incubator within the J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute at Arizona State University, that is “set to award an impressive $300,000 in seed grant funding to ventures demonstrating technological innovation and delivering benefits to the broader Phoenix area. Funding opportunities are available for ventures addressing key areas within the full lifecycle of food and advanced ventures seeking to pilot new technology.”
entrepreneurship.asu.edu
https://entrepreneurship.asu.edu/programs/cultivate-phx-agrifood-tech-incubator/ (where Raghu Nandivada gets quoted)
As you can see, Padma AgRobotics has lots of connections to Arizona State University.
“Gimme an R!”

news.asu.edu
Could Padma AgRobotics possibly be engaged with us?
Remember the AkidaNet model published in a November 2022 paper by Vi Nguyen Thanh Le, Kevin, Tsiknos, Kristofor Carlson (all BrainChip) and Selam Ahderom (Edith Cowan University), first referred to in posts by @thelittleshort and @Fullmoonfever?
While I couldn’t find any specific mention of neuromorphic technology anywhere on their website or in either of their two SBIR grant applications for another precision agriculture project, namely “an autonomous harvester for cilantro with bunching and tying capability” (SBIR I phase was from 24 April 2023 to 29 February 2024 > US$181,500; the ongoing SBIR II phase is from 1 September 2024 to 31 August 2026 > US$ 650,000), the multiple ASU connections as well as the fact that a 2023 BrainChip summer intern verifiably worked with them for six months earlier this year, in combination with recalling a July 2023 interview with Nandan Nayampally made me wonder whether Padma AgRobotics could be a valid dot-join.
In said interview (watch from around 18 min), which I believe was first posted here on TSE by @TECH https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-323887), Nandan referred to the long-term benefits of scaling your business offerings to a broader clientele by giving the example of preferably employing a consumer-friendly-priced service model for compact lawnmowers with weed-killing capabilities utilising Akida technology (hypothetical example only?) rather than trying to sell units of (already existing) premium lawnmowers with very expensive and bulky weed-control systems. (“Today, the economy is moving from a device economy to a service economy.”).
Now guess what the current business model of Padma AgRobotics looks like?
[To be continued in another post due to the upload limit of 10 files…]
After graduating in April of this year with an “MS in Robotics and Autonomous Systems (Honors)”, he worked for a company called Padma AgRobotics for six months - so until very recently (his CV is not quite as up-to-date as his LinkedIn and GitHub profiles in that respect).
Padma AgRobotics is a five-year old startup based in Chandler, AZ and very much intertwined with Arizona State University (ASU): Not only is its founder, Raghu Nandivada, an ASU alumni, but equally robotics engineer Cole Brauer, who had joined the then one-month old company in January 2020 and only left the start-up in July of this year and is now self-employed.
In May 2020, Padma AgRobotics won US$15,000 for their invention of weed-killing robots in the ASU-backed Sarsam Family Venture Challenge, and earlier this year Raghu Nandivada was featured in a fireside chat with Cultivate PHX, an AgriFood Tech Incubator within the J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute at Arizona State University, that is “set to award an impressive $300,000 in seed grant funding to ventures demonstrating technological innovation and delivering benefits to the broader Phoenix area. Funding opportunities are available for ventures addressing key areas within the full lifecycle of food and advanced ventures seeking to pilot new technology.”
Cultivate PHX - Virtual Fireside Chat - J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute

https://entrepreneurship.asu.edu/programs/cultivate-phx-agrifood-tech-incubator/ (where Raghu Nandivada gets quoted)
As you can see, Padma AgRobotics has lots of connections to Arizona State University.
“Gimme an R!”


ASU entrepreneurs pitch via video for online Demo Day competition | ASU News
Sometimes even a small amount of money makes a huge difference. An Arizona State University student took the $4,000 that she won in a Demo Day competition a year ago and created a company in her native Ghana to help feed children.
Could Padma AgRobotics possibly be engaged with us?
Remember the AkidaNet model published in a November 2022 paper by Vi Nguyen Thanh Le, Kevin, Tsiknos, Kristofor Carlson (all BrainChip) and Selam Ahderom (Edith Cowan University), first referred to in posts by @thelittleshort and @Fullmoonfever?
Don’t think anyone has gone down this rabbit hole yet? I looked into the DSTG Women in STEM Award - specifically what her paper was about
I couldn’t actually find the paper that the won the award - An energy-efficient AkidaNet for morphologically similar weeds and crops recognition at the Edge' (co-authors Kevin Tsiknos, Kristofor Carlson, Selam Ahder, but another one that lead to the outputs below
Just googling for dots and this presso / paper I posted about back in Jan popped up.
Couldn't find it back then but it's HERE if anyone wanted a read.
@Diogenese thoughts whenever if you have time or anything of interest in it?
TIA
While I couldn’t find any specific mention of neuromorphic technology anywhere on their website or in either of their two SBIR grant applications for another precision agriculture project, namely “an autonomous harvester for cilantro with bunching and tying capability” (SBIR I phase was from 24 April 2023 to 29 February 2024 > US$181,500; the ongoing SBIR II phase is from 1 September 2024 to 31 August 2026 > US$ 650,000), the multiple ASU connections as well as the fact that a 2023 BrainChip summer intern verifiably worked with them for six months earlier this year, in combination with recalling a July 2023 interview with Nandan Nayampally made me wonder whether Padma AgRobotics could be a valid dot-join.

In said interview (watch from around 18 min), which I believe was first posted here on TSE by @TECH https://thestockexchange.com.au/threads/brn-discussion-ongoing.1/post-323887), Nandan referred to the long-term benefits of scaling your business offerings to a broader clientele by giving the example of preferably employing a consumer-friendly-priced service model for compact lawnmowers with weed-killing capabilities utilising Akida technology (hypothetical example only?) rather than trying to sell units of (already existing) premium lawnmowers with very expensive and bulky weed-control systems. (“Today, the economy is moving from a device economy to a service economy.”).
Now guess what the current business model of Padma AgRobotics looks like?
[To be continued in another post due to the upload limit of 10 files…]