Raven Industries, Inc., a precision agriculture technology provider, recently opened a new 15,000-square-foot engineering center office in Scottsdale to support the advancement of automated and driverless agriculture technology.
The new office located at SkySong employs engineers focused on machine learning, artificial intelligence and computer vision. Raven employees also have access to two nearby test farms in Maricopa and Casa Grande to conduct same-day testing, enabling more efficient agriculture technology iteration. Raven expects to hire over 50 Arizona employees in the next year.
“We are designing, developing, testing and deploying technology solutions that will impact the ability for farmers to feed our growing population amid labor shortages with greater efficiency,” said Phil Corio, Senior Director of Engineering for Raven. “As we continued to consider our growing needs for AI and machine learning development, it became clear that we needed a specialized space to accomplish our goals — and the Phoenix metro area emerged as the ideal place to do this.”
Sioux Falls-based Raven Industries designs and develops autonomous vehicles that can till, spray and harvest farmland. Their technology can also integrate with existing farming implements to automate in-field
operations. Raven chose Arizona due to the state’s large and skilled talent pool and stable weather conditions for autonomous vehicle (AV) testing.
“We are excited Raven Industries has chosen Scottsdale for its tech-forward engineering center,” said Sandra Watson, President and CEO of the Arizona Commerce Authority. “Raven Industries’ new office furthers Arizona’s leadership as an automated vehicle innovation center while creating more jobs in the agritech industry and advancing new technologies.”
“Raven Industries’ expansion into Scottsdale demonstrates successful economic development which draws transformative technologies and a very talented workforce to our beautiful city,” said David Ortega, Mayor of Scottsdale.
Raven’s Arizona location showcases the state’s attractiveness as an epicenter for automated driving and technology. Waymo, Cruise, Ford, TuSimple, Embark, Intel and more have AV operations in Arizona. Companies also test their cars at proving grounds in Arizona including GM, Ford, Toyota, VW, Chrysler and Nissan.
