Hectre’s AI-powered fruit grading has expanded from New Zealand to 22 export markets.

Fruit technology company Hectre has scanned billions of individual fruits – apples, pears, cherries, orange, lemons, limes, mandarins, plums, and peaches – training its AI model to grade fruit by size and colour. That massive dataset has enabled rapid global expansion.

Hectre now serves around a third of the New Zealand apple market and has customers in 22 countries. In Chile, it’s grown 1,000% over the past year. Its two biggest markets are Europe and the US, and demand is growing in Türkiye and South Africa. With 37 staff globally, 24 in Aotearoa New Zealand, the fast-growing company has been almost doubling its revenue growth year-on-year.

Investors include Nuance Capital and Cultivate Ventures, with $12 million raised in a Series A round led by Punakaiki Fund, announced in February 2026.

In the eight years since AGMARDT funded its first GPS data mapping product, Hectre has evolved into a data platform for the fresh produce supply chain. Its flagship product is Fruit Quality AI, which sizes and colour-grades fruit.

“Our business today is fruit quality AI,” explains founder Matty Blomfield. “You can drive bins or a full truckload of fruit underneath our hardware-enabled vision platform. We scan it and provide size and colour grade information, which is between 96% and 99% accurate for fruit quality.”

The 2017 grant from AGMARDT was small – just $8,800 – but it came at a critical time, says Blomfield. “It was enough to just get by for a few months,” enabling him to commit to Hectre for long enough to win clients and additional funding, including $25,000 from accelerator Vodafone Zone. “That kept the lights on for another six months until we started to get some customers paying.”

“AGMARDT was a lifeline that just made it possible to keep going,” says Blomfield. “Without it, there’s a good chance there wouldn’t be a company today.”

Blomfield’s own force of will and commitment were the other critical factors. Hectre was his fourth start-up, and his first in the primary sector. His previous venture, wedding software, failed after spending hundreds of thousands and a year in development, without talking to a single person planning a wedding.

“It’s crazy thinking back,” he says. “We didn’t talk to a customer once.”

Lesson learned, Hectre began with customer validation: speaking directly to potential customers to validate real pain points and industry needs. The idea for the apple industry began as a drone application, but after talking to growers, they found a more urgent problem – orchards were still being managed with pen and paper.

Hectre developed a GPS-based heatmap concept that would visualise the most and least productive parts of an orchard. When one grower said he’d spent 15 years trying to collect this data, they knew they were onto something.

More lessons were learned along the way. “The company almost died after the first apple season. We’d set customer expectations high but completely underdelivered,” says Blomfield. Affected customers were offered the service for free the following year. “We said, if it works, then pay us for it next year.” That decision put severe financial constraints around Hectre’s first years, but enabled technology issues to be ironed out while maintaining customer loyalty.

By 2019, the team began investing in Hectre’s machine learning and computer vision capabilities, this time responding to a worldwide problem: inefficient fruit supply chains with up to 40% fruit loss. Years of R&D across computer vision, machine learning and neural networks built the hardware-enabled software product into a highly accurate tool that helps packhouses and growers manage inventory and make decisions based on fruit quality.

For packhouses, the technology can lift throughput by around 30%, enabling packing lines to run closer to capacity, because they’re not being slowed to manage fruit that doesn’t meet expectations.

New Zealand growers benefit from being first in line for innovation. When leading citrus supplier First Fresh NZ asked if Spectre could size citrus, Hectre developed and delivered the technology in less than two months, making them the first citrus enterprise globally to use it.

Blomfield credits Hectre’s success to targeting the right point in the value chain. “Our primary customers are commercial entities with a return-on-investment lens, and they are willing to invest capital to improve their bottom line,” he says. His advice to agritech entrepreneurs is to consider who your value proposition is for and where they sit in the supply chain – many growers are just getting by, and trying to charge them money for solutions is not easy.

Next up for Hectre is seeing inside the fruit. Having scanned billions of fruits to master external grading, the company is now taking on internal quality, with infrared/hyperspectral imaging that can detect fruit defects and maturity before committing to long term storage, and could save New Zealand packhouses and growers over $100 million annually.

That original $8,800 AGMARDT grant has multiplied beyond recognition. Blomfield’s goal? A $1 billion valuation and more than $100 million revenue in the next five years.

Grant: A17024, Hectre

Date: March–August 2017