VISION
A farrowing room where nothing dies unseen
Every crate watched through every farrowing, every roll of the sow and every stalled birth caught while it can still be undone, on any farm, not just the ones that can afford a night crew.
SMART SWINE, LLC · COLLEGE STATION, TX
Every piglet deserves
to be seen.
Smart Swine builds camera intelligence for the farrowing room: SPM-01, a sealed dual-axis monitor that watches the sow and her litter through the most dangerous week of a pig's life, and SPC-01, a motorized curtain that acts on what the monitor sees.
WHY WE EXIST
Piglets do not die in secret.
Nobody is watching.
The deaths that empty a farrowing room are visible events with short windows, and no stockperson can stand at the right crate at the right moment, every time, all night. That is a supervision gap, not a biology problem, and supervision is exactly what a camera is for. We build the camera.
MISSION
Give every crate a set of eyes that pays for itself
Build affordable, washdown-proof perception for the farrowing crate, turn what it sees into alerts a herd team can act on, and price it inside the value of the piglets it saves.
WHERE WE ARE
Prototype validated. Producers waiting.
Smart Swine grew out of Texas A&M: sensing research, an on-farm trial and a venture program, in that order. The hardware is a farm-validated prototype moving toward production design, and the next milestone is getting units onto barns that are not ours.
~$1Mnon-dilutive NSF & USDA-NIFA support, 2026–2029
27 / 531semifinalist, 2026 AI Venture Velocity Challenge, 531 teams across 160 universities
3 + 3a three-discipline team with three academic and business advisors
Freetrials on offer for the 2026 farrowing season, while the build slots last
The product pages show you a concept design. If you would rather see what the system actually did on a farm, the unedited trial footage is in the case study.
THE TEAM
Who is building this
Robotics, computer vision and animal science: everything a crate-mounted sensor needs to be built, trained and trusted, in one team.
Ziyuan “Steven” Zhao
Robotics & Automation · Marketing
Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University researching robotics and automation. Builds the machine, from CAD to the farrowing room, and leads go-to-market, having headed overseas markets for other companies expanding abroad.
Personal site ziyuanzhao.org (opens in a new tab)
Yu “Andy” Wang
Computer Vision
Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University researching computer vision. Builds the eyes: the models that read sow posture, respiration and the lateral roll, and tell a newborn from a stillborn in the landing zone.
Emmanuel Otchere
Animal Science
Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University researching animal welfare and productivity. Keeps it honest to the animal: sow and piglet biology, on-farm trial protocols and the producer studies that shape what we build.
Advisors
Domain experts who keep the engineering, the agronomy and the business honest.
Dr. Ziteng “Tim” Xu
Bioengineering Scientist
Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University, working on smart technologies for livestock production, machine learning and robotics.
Faculty page poultry.tamu.edu (opens in a new tab)
Dr. David Flint
Business Strategy
Clinical Professor and Director, M.S. in Entrepreneurial Leadership, Mays Business School, Texas A&M University.
Personal site drdavidflint.com (opens in a new tab)
Dr. Jianfeng Zhou
Agricultural Engineering Scientist
Associate Professor, University of Missouri, working on precision livestock farming and agricultural sensing.
Faculty page cafnr.missouri.edu (opens in a new tab)PARTNERS & SUPPORT
The people who know pigs
University research partners, the federal programs behind our non-dilutive support, and the pork-industry organizations that opened doors to producers.
Pork-industry organizations provided letters of support and helped distribute our producer survey. They are not investors, customers or commercial partners. NSF and USDA-NIFA are listed as sources of non-dilutive grant support, not as endorsements.
Try one on your crates. Free.
We fit an SPM-01 prototype to one of your farrowing crates, leave it there through weaning and collect it afterward. The trial costs you nothing and your data stays yours. We build the units by hand, so slots are limited and go in the order producers ask.