Today's e-Edition Get Morning Report and other email newsletters Get Morning Report and other email newsletters Today's e-Edition Trending: SANTA CLARA , A farm robotics company whose technologies could revolutionize farming and food production has bought a big Santa Clara office building that it had previously subleased.
Blue River Technology, which is a unit of manufacturing and agricultural equipment titan Deere & Co., has bought an office building at 3303 Scott Blvd. in Santa Clara, documents filed on Oct. 28 with the Santa Clara County Recorder’s Office show.
The robotics company paid million for the office building in Santa Clara, according to the county records.
Blue River subleased the building in or around July 2022.
San Jose-based Toeniskoetter Development, via an affiliate, sold the 3033 Scott Blvd. building to Blue River, the public documents show.
The Toeniskoetter firm developed the office property in 2015.
Blue River Technology bought the building through an all-cash deal.
Blue River at present occupies a Sunnyvale building that totals 55,000 square feet. “3303 Scott is a really good location and John Deere thought it is a good location,” said Brad Krouskup, chief executive officer with Toeniskoetter Development.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the sublease transaction or the property purchase would result in Blue River’s exit from its Sunnyvale office.
At present, it appears Blue River intends to retain its Sunnyvale office. “When Blue River subleased the building, they made it clear to us that they would be interested in buying it,” Krouskup said. “We started sales discussions about two or three months ago.” In 2017, Deere & Co. bought Blue River in a 5 million acquisition.
The deal has enabled Deere & Co. to deploy Blue River’s robotics and artificial intelligence into a widening array of equipment and machinery that Deere supplies.
Blue River’s technologies enable farmers to use Deere’s ultra-modern equipment to zero in on specific weeds to spray and kill off.
This high-tech approach has been crafted to replace conventional techniques of mass spraying of weeds in fields.
In March 2022, Deere & Co. introduced a product called “See & Spray” that has grafted Blue River’s artificial intelligence and robotics onto Deere agricultural spraying equipment. “See & Spray Ultimate can reduce non-residual herbicide use by more than two-thirds by only spraying weeds in corn, soybeans, and cotton,” Deere stated in a prepared release in March.
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Blue River has amassed a huge number of images to bolster its artificial intelligence and robotics technologies. “Through 500-plus years of collecting millions of images of plants and weeds across hundreds of thousands of acres, See & Spray is capable of detecting a variety of crops and weeds to provide weed control,” Blue River states in a post on its website.
Stanford University graduate students Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden founded Blue River Technology in 2011.
Krouskup believes that while some sectors of the office sector might be struggling, other segments are poised for a better performance. “The leasing markets are struggling a bit with inflation and interest rates,” Krouskup said.
He added, “You are still seeing buying interest” for some office buildings.
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