West Lafayette, IND, Aug. 25, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Too often, researchers spend more time wrangling data than interpreting it, stuck behind a computer screen instead of uncovering the next breakthrough.

The sheer complexity and volume of data gathered during research can slow innovation to a halt. GRYFN, a Purdue Strategic Ventures portfolio company, is changing that. By automating labor intensive data gathering and processing, GRYFN technology augments rather than replaces human talent, automating manual tasks and enabling deeper, faster insights.

Founded by eight Purdue professors, GRYFN combines custom hardware, software, and drones into a unified sensing solution. Because no one type of data (called a modality) offers all the answers, the company’s advanced multimodal sensing solutions collect multiple types of data at once, at scale, and precisely “co-aligns” the data spatially. Think of a digital twin at the plant scale.

A new partnership and technology deployment to a network of Australian universities, the Australian Plant Phenomics Network (APPN), underscores the expansive possibilities of GRYFN’s solutions. The network provides open access to state-of-the-art plant phenotyping infrastructure to enable research excellence and innovation for sustainable agriculture. Over the last year, six nodes in the APPN network have deployed 11 GRYFN sensing solutions to enhance the existing research ecosystem.

“GRYFN emerged from Purdue professors who understood the need for tools that scale labor intensive data collection and drive new insights in academic and industry research,” GRYFN CEO Matt Bechdol said. “We are excited to support the APPN model and ultimately demonstrate how it will be replicated around the world in different applications to offer solutions for some of the world’s most pressing natural resource challenges.”

The solutions deployed in Australia use multimodal sensing, collecting hyperspectral, LiDAR, and RGB data in a unified framework. Leveraging a high-end GPS and sophisticated engineering approaches, they align each data set for a clear image, delivering research-grade, aligned maps in three dimensions. With this integration, researchers have access to a deeper, more accurate, and more scalable understanding of complex systems to augment their laboratory and field data collections.

For APPN, which focuses on developing climate-resilient, nutritious crops, moving out of controlled environments and into real world research is critical. By making these larger, more complex data sets easier to ingest and interpret, GRYFN’s tools can help accelerate innovation even when handling complex field data.

“Processing complex data streams, such as LIDAR and hyperspectral can be challenging, particularly when capturing data in field situations,” said Trevor Garnett, national field phenomics director for APPN. “Working with GRYFN and their processing pipelines makes this task much easier. The integrated software and user-friendly interfaces are of particular value across our widely distributed network, since staff of different levels of experience can intuitively access and leverage the data gathered.”

While rooted in agriculture, GRYFN’s multimodal sensing solutions have applications far beyond a single market. The processing tool automates job-based workflows, co-aligns multi-modal data, and outputs high quality data — beneficial to a range of research and natural resource applications.

Strategic partners are taking notice. Headwall, a leader in creating and enabling customers to deploy hyperspectral imaging products and technology, has partnered with GRYFN to share best practices in the emerging field.

“It’s incredible and commendable that this small, focused team has come up with such a sophisticated technology, rivaling many multinational corporations,” said David Blair, chief product officer at Headwall. “Our strategic partnership has allowed us to share and adopt best practices from mission planning through data processing, improving our customer’s experience with our products. It’s easy to see opportunity to further leverage this platform for research into food and water availability, forest health, greenhouse gas emissions monitoring, and much more.”

Sophisticated, easy to use data processes and pipelines are required for commercial and industrial adoption and GRYFN has answered the call. Most exciting, agree Bechdol and the company’s strategic partners, is the potential to uncover discoveries researchers haven’t even imagined.

“When we cut out big chunks of time managing data, we free human resources and open up new opportunities for novel, exploratory research that drives real innovation,” Bechdol said. “When these labor-intensive tasks are automated, we are that much closer to real-time monitoring. When we understand a scenario that deeply, we begin to shift from old questions to new, to explore what we haven’t even conceived of yet.”

To learn more about GRYFN’s multimodal sensing solutions, visit GRYFN.io.

About GRYFN
GRYFN provides advanced multi-modal sensing solutions for Research Markets, offering research-ready, high-precision, multi-sensor UAV solutions that simultaneously acquire high-resolution RGB, LiDAR, and Hyperspectral data. GRYFN’s software provides enterprise-ready datasets of multi-modal, multi-temporal data for research insights to drive actionable decisions across agriculture, environmental, and other natural resource applications.

GRYFN was founded by eight Purdue University professors with backgrounds in Aeronautics, Biology, Plant Sciences, Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Civil Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. Based in West Lafayette, Indiana, USA, GRYFN deploys solutions worldwide.

About Purdue Strategic Ventures
Purdue Strategic Ventures provides strategic support, early-stage investment and community activation for Purdue-connected, venture-scale startups with strong growth potential across agriculture, deep tech, digital tech, mobility and life sciences. Within the Purdue Research Foundation, Strategic Ventures unlocks opportunities for lasting startup growth, transforming potential into performance for portfolio companies.

Strategic Ventures is the nexus between entrepreneurial talent and strategic capital, driving Boilermaker innovation and investment success. For more information, visit strategicventures.prf.org.

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• GRYFN turns data collection chaos into clarity, helping researchers focus on what matters
• GRYFN turns data collection chaos into clarity, helping researchers focus on what matters

Polly Barks
Purdue Research Foundation
765-588-3470
phbarks@prf.org