When Benedikt Keßler was a kid, he spent long hours standing at a sorting table on his parents' potato farm in Germany. The work was dusty, noisy, and exhausting. "You check every single potato by hand," he remembers. "After a few hours, your back hurts and your eyes sting." Years later, while studying mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Munich, Keßler decided to build a machine that could do that job instead of him.
He teamed up with two friends, Johannes von Wittke and Felix Beck, and together they founded Karevo, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to sort potatoes. Their machine can handle up to 10 tons of potatoes every single hour with 95 percent accuracy. To teach the AI how to spot bad potatoes, the team fed it more than 100,000 pictures of potatoes in all shapes and conditions. Now the machine can detect rot, cracks, wireworms, and five other types of defects. It can even spot foreign objects mixed in with the potatoes.
Most other sorting machines struggle with dirty potatoes, but Karevo's system handles them just fine. Potatoes look different depending on the soil they grew in, the region they came from, and how long they have been stored. Other systems get confused by those differences. Karevo's AI adapts quickly to the specific potatoes on each farm.
The team designed their machine especially for small and family-run farms. Large commercial sorting equipment is often too expensive, too big, or too complicated for smaller operations. Karevo's version is smaller, more affordable, and built with a modular design, which means farmers can easily fix it or add new parts without calling in a specialist. "I developed the machine that would have taken the backbreaking work off my hands at my parents' potato farm," Keßler said.
Karevo went through the UnternehmerTUM Incubator, a program at the Technical University of Munich that helps student startups get off the ground. The founders built their first prototypes in the Makerspace, a workshop full of high-tech tools. They officially launched Karevo in 2024 and have been selling machines to farms since fall 2025. The startup is now part of a growing movement to bring smart technology to small-scale agriculture, where tools like these can make a real difference in farmers' daily lives.