A food tech startup that’s been building up a robust user base has raised $2.8 million from investors including Tencent, a major player in the China food and beverage industry.
The funding round will fund Cornell, a food technology company that is also building a user-friendly interface to help people find the best organic and natural food for their home.
Cornell is part of a burgeoning market of companies focused on developing “smart” food apps that can help consumers find, shop and consume organic and locally sourced food.
Cornell’s food-to-consumer service, CornellFood, allows people to browse organic and local grocery stores across the country.
It also lets consumers track the price of ingredients and make purchases with their phones.
CornellFood was built using the Cornell University and Cornell Graduate School of Education’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
It was developed in part by Cornell professor and co-founder Chris Anderson, who recently retired after a stint as Cornell’s dean of students.
Anderson previously spent six years at Microsoft Research, where he helped develop Cortana, a personal assistant that can be used to make a wide variety of decisions about things like the weather.
Anderson and his team also built Cornell’s own artificial intelligence platform, a cloud-based platform that lets users search for and buy groceries using machine learning, artificial intelligence, and a combination of both.
Cornell Food’s user interface, called CornellFoodLab, is designed to help users find and shop at their local grocery store.
The Cornell Food app was developed using the Google App Engine and the Cornell Graduate Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
It’s built to help Cornell Food customers locate, browse and buy organic and/or locally sourced foods.
CornellFarms.com was launched in August 2018 and is one of several apps that allow Cornell Food users to track the prices of ingredients in their local stores.
A Cornell Food customer can also search for products in a local grocery, and CornellFarm.com lets users see a map of the stores where those products are available.
Cornellfood.com’s search function is designed for people to search for the best grocery items, including organic and healthy options, according to the Cornell website.
Cornell food, organic and sustainable options are a core part of CornellFalls.com.
Cornell also is developing CornellFood.com for its Cornell graduate students, and is working with the Cornell School of Engineering to make it more useful for graduate students.
Cornell, however, does not yet offer its students an app for the Cornell graduate program.
In 2017, Cornell announced plans to acquire the software company Hadoop, a company that makes a wide range of cloud-storage, processing and data processing services, which are aimed at helping students get a better grasp on the computing resources they need to solve real-world problems.
It recently announced a partnership with Microsoft Azure, a provider of big data analytics, to enable a new way for students to get access to Hadoops data.
In a statement, Cornell said it is “a pioneer in the food and consumer technology space.”