TerraBlaster Raises $12.5M for Mars Rover Soil Sensing
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TerraBlaster has closed a $12.5 million seed round led by Ulu Ventures, bringing cumulative funding to $16.5 million after a $4 million pre seed in 2025.
Khosla Ventures, Trailhead Capital, Builders Vision, Bidra, Ag Startup Engine, Reservoir, Sunna, Plug and Play, GrainInnovate and the Hort Innovation Venture Fund managed by Artesian all joined. The company is based in Redwood City, California, and is preparing for commercial operations in 2027.
The technology has an unusual heritage. TerraBlaster uses laser induced breakdown spectroscopy, first deployed on the Mars rover, packaged into rugged sensors that a tractor or ATV drags through soil at a depth of about six inches. A high energy laser pulse vaporizes a tiny amount of material to create a plasma, and the light the plasma emits as it cools reveals the elemental composition. The result is a live map of pH along with nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and other nutrients, with no lab in the loop.
What that buys a farmer is resolution. Conventional sampling means walking a field, taking multiple samples, mixing and bagging them, and waiting days for lab results that arrive too late to act on. Most growers sample at roughly 2.5 acre grids, a coarseness that hides real variation. A block that reads as uniformly rich in potassium at that scale can contain both deficient and excessive zones, so fertilizer gets over applied in some spots and under applied in others.
TerraBlaster’s first product, the Blaster 1000, is a towed unit that opens a shallow trench and measures fertility roughly twenty times per second, producing maps at 0.15 acre resolution, about 80 feet by 80 feet. That happens to match the working width of application equipment already on farms, so the data is immediately actionable through standard variable rate spreaders.
The company puts the economics at around $10 per acre saved on lab testing, sampling and shipping, plus roughly $35 per acre in additional yield for corn and soy, with gains reaching 20% in the most deficient areas. Pricing for the farm machinery itself is still being finalized, though the company expects costs to fall as the device shrinks, and its pitch is that it should not exceed what growers already spend on soil sampling.
Speed is the current constraint. The system works at 5mph today, which the company expects to double to 10mph and eventually push toward 20mph using a narrower probe that moves through soil more easily. Beyond towing, the sensors can be folded into work farmers are already doing, taking measurements during planting or tilling rather than requiring a separate pass.
The longer term ambition is to measure and fertilize simultaneously, which matters most for mobile nutrients like nitrogen and sulfur whose levels move quickly after rain. The Blaster 1000 measures only, and an integrated measure and apply system is slated for testing in 2028.
CEO Jorge Heraud previously cofounded the agricultural robotics company Blue River Technology, which John Deere acquired for $305 million, and was approached by Impossible Sensing last year to build a company around its spectroscopy work for agriculture. After extensive testing in Iowa last year, TerraBlaster is running demonstrations with growers and retailers across the Midwest this fall, with commitments for its first systems already in hand ahead of a pre-sale. The seed money funds mass production of the sensor hardware, growth in the agronomy and data analytics teams, and wider field deployment testing across commercial farming networks.
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