Gauss Technologies: Platform for 3D Plant Scanning and Structural Phenotyping

Opportunity for

• Growers, plant breeders, hobbyists and researchers to be early field trialists and help test, evaluate and refine a smartphone-app based 3D plant-scanning and phenotyping platform designed for use across commercial agriculture, research, and general plant interest.

Opportunity description

Industry Challenge

Measuring, monitoring, and characterising 3D plant growth and structure remains a complex challenge for growers relying on manual measurements. Meaningful plant traits require repeated quantitative measurement over time, yet manual approaches are labour-intensive, difficult to scale and often fail to capture key structural attributes such as canopy volume, branching architecture and biomass proxies. As a result, detailed 3D structural phenotyping is typically confined to specialised facilities or service providers using dedicated sensors and controlled workflows, limiting accessibility despite demonstrated value. This gap highlights the need for more accessible tools that enable broader engagement with 3D structural plant monitoring and measurement across diverse user groups and environments and frames the current digital plant monitoring and tracking market landscape.

Current opportunity

We are seeking early field trialists to help test, evaluate and refine a smartphone-app based 3D plant-scanning and phenotyping platform designed for use across commercial agriculture, research, and general plant interest. Participants will have the opportunity to trial the technology at no cost, provide feedback on its practical value, and contribute to shaping its development based on their interests/needs for broader adoption.

To submit your interest, 'enquire now' to Quinlan Barthelme on growAG by 31st December 2026. 

Visit the website to find out more. Please note the domain is new and cannot be accessed through some university firewalls.

Opportunity background

The Gauss phenotyping platform and Gauss Smartphone Application are being developed by an independent founder, with access to breeders, growers, and research partners across tree crops and controlled-environment cultivation systems. 

The current proof-of-concept enables users to capture plant scenes, isolate individual plants or plant structures, and derive repeatable structural measurements describing plant architecture all accessible through a smartphone. These measurements are designed to support consistent visualisation, comparison, and user-led interpretation of plant structure across time, sites, and growing contexts, providing a low cost practical interface for working with scan-derived phenotypic information at an individual scale.

The primary point of difference is accessibility. Capabilities traditionally associated with specialised phenotyping facilities, enterprise platforms, or custom sensing systems often require significant cost, technical expertise, or structured engagement with service providers, which can limit early exploration and practical evaluation by breeders, growers, and researchers. In contrast, the Gauss phenotyping application is designed to lower this barrier by enabling accessible interaction with structural plant measurement workflows through widely available mobile devices.

Existing plant-focused mobile tools - including plant care applications and general-purpose mobile scanning apps - typically emphasise two-dimensional imagery, care reminders, or basic diagnostics. While useful for monitoring and visual reference, these approaches generally do not capture the three-dimensional structural complexity required for reliable morphological phenotyping. The Gauss phenotyping application addresses this gap by providing accessible 3D structural capture and measurement within a platform-agnostic environment, complementing rather than replacing existing plant science, breeding, and orchard management workflows.