26 August 2026
The Waikato-based company is commercialising advanced sensing, imaging and native artificial intelligence technologies for the post-harvest sector, helping growers and packers understand more about the quality of their produce.
CAILU combines multiple sensor technologies with AI to assess both internal and external characteristics of produce. Its CAILU Fusion technology is designed to reveal information beyond what traditional optical inspection can see, providing insights into internal structure, density, composition, quality and storability.
The technology has been developed around a simple commercial principle: solve a real problem for growers and packers and make the technology practical to deploy. That includes upgrading existing grading infrastructure rather than requiring customers to replace an entire packing line. CAILU’s retrofit approach allows packhouses to extend the life of existing equipment while adding new AI and sensing capabilities.
That proposition is now moving beyond New Zealand. CAILU is beginning to export its post-harvest grading technology into international produce markets, targeting crops including apples, blueberries, kiwifruit and onions, with solutions developed around the specific characteristics and grading requirements of each crop. For Edison Darby and CAILU, this is an important milestone: the technology is no longer simply being validated. It is now an exportable commercial product.
A key part of the Edison Darby model is maintaining a close connection between research, industry and commercialisation.
Rather than treating research as an endpoint, the business works with New Zealand start-ups and industry bodies to identify problems that can be solved through technology, develop and test potential solutions, and then build a pathway towards commercial deployment.
CAILU based from their Waikato Innovation Hub reflects this approach. Located on a working farm rather than in a conventional city office, the facility provides a real-world environment where technologies can be developed, tested and refined alongside growers and packers.
That proximity to industry is particularly important in horticulture, where produce varies by crop, variety, growing conditions, season and market requirements. Research projects involving New Zealand-grown produce therefore become more than technology demonstrations. They generate the data, knowledge and commercial understanding needed to develop solutions that can ultimately work at scale — in both New Zealand and in international markets.
This creates a role for Edison Darby and its ventures that sits between research organisation and technology supplier: working alongside New Zealand companies as a development and commercialisation partner to turn industry challenges into commercially useful technology.
Edison Darby’s role is to help bridge that gap by bringing commercial thinking into the development process early: asking not only whether a technology works, but whether it solves an important problem, can be industrialised, will attract customers and can scale beyond New Zealand.
For CAILU, those questions are now being answered in international markets. With CAILU beginning to export its post-harvest grading technology, Edison Darby is demonstrating what happens when the focus shifts from simply developing technology to building globally scalable businesses around it.