The future of fruit picking does not look like a giant tractor ripping through a field. It looks like a small flying robot, tethered to a rolling platform, slipping between orchard branches, scanning an apple, deciding if it is ready, and picking it without bruising the crop.

That is the bet behind Tevel Aerobotics, an Israeli agtech company building Flying Autonomous Robots for one of agriculture’s oldest problems: fruit must be picked at exactly the right moment, but the workers needed to do it are increasingly hard to find.

Tevel’s drones are not ordinary quadcopters. They operate as part of a connected harvesting system, using artificial intelligence, computer vision, machine learning, guidance algorithms and onboard sensors to identify fruit, navigate through foliage, and pick only what is ready. The robots can work around the clock, giving farmers something they have never really had during peak harvest: control.

The company’s technology is already moving beyond lab demos. Tevel says its robots are operating in orchards from Israel to Italy, Chile and the United States. In Chile, the company deployed an eight-robot harvesting system in Unifrutti’s apple orchards in Linares. In California, HMC Farms said Tevel’s drones successfully harvested peaches, nectarines and plums. Tevel lists apples, peaches, apricots, nectarines, plums and pears among the fruits its systems are picking.

That matters because tree-fruit harvesting is one of the hardest jobs in farming to automate. Fruit hides behind leaves. Branches move. Every apple, peach or plum sits at a different angle. Ripeness changes by row, color and variety. A machine that is too rough can damage the crop; a harvest that is too late can cost the farmer real money.

Tevel’s answer is not just to replace hands with rotors. Its robots also collect data on every fruit they pick, including size, weight, color, ripeness, disease indicators, timestamps and geolocation. Before a bin even reaches the packing house, the grower can know what is inside it. That turns harvesting from a rushed seasonal scramble into a measurable, trackable operation.

The timing is not accidental. Farms around the world are facing a brutal squeeze as higher labor costs, fewer seasonal pickers, extreme heat during harvest windows, and buyers who still expect perfect fruit on the shelf. FAO data show global fruit and vegetable production reached 2.1 billion tonnes in 2023, but the people needed to harvest that food are not showing up in the same way they once did.

Investors have noticed. Tevel has drawn backing from names including Kubota, OurCrowd, Maverick Ventures and AgFunder, and Calcalist listed the company at $38.5 million raised to date. A newer industry report said Tevel secured an additional $18 million Series C as it pushes its robotic harvesters deeper into commercial use.