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History of Vali System
How Vali started?
The story of Vali dates back to 2011, when a small team of undergraduate students came together to solve one of the most important challenges facing the country’s saffron industry. Javad Ghiasi, himself a native of Kashmar, Khorasan, had realized the difficulties of harvesting and processing saffron flowers, and with the help of a team he had formed, they built the first simple prototypes to solve this challenge.
Born in the country's technology hub
One of the members of this team was Mohammad Karami, who decided to dedicate his thesis to this topic after entering Sharif University of Technology as a master’s student. The coincidence of Mohammad’s proposal of this topic and the request of farmers and saffron industry activists in Khorasan Province for the university to solve the challenge of saffron flower processing motivated one of the best professors of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology, Professor Dur Ali, to accept the supervision of this project.
Professor Durali, who had received his PhD from the world’s best engineering university (MIT), believed that students should work on projects that would be a panacea for our country’s problems, not a series of research hypotheses. Now everything was ready for the governor to be born in the country’s technology hub.
Years of effort to commercialize a technology
Work began in the summer of 2014, and a team of students took charge of various parts of the processing line. The goal was to design and prototype an automated saffron flower processing line that would be highly accurate and fast, and would overcome the problems and limitations of manual saffron processing.
With the team’s round-the-clock efforts, the first prototype of a saffron processing line was built in 2016. A collection of advanced and state-of-the-art technologies (artificial intelligence, robotics, mechatronics, and image processing) was placed alongside numerous inventions and innovations by the university’s elites so that this production line could perform the complex operation of cleaning saffron flowers completely automatically and without manual intervention.
But there was still a long way to go from a university prototype to producing a reliable industrial product. After graduating, Mohammad, along with Javad and a group of elites from Sharif University and other leading universities in the country, founded Vali Smart Agricultural Systems Company in 2018. After attracting investors, Vali quickly went through the process of developing and upgrading the product until finally, in 2019, the first Vali saffron processing production line was installed and put into operation in a private company.
Entering the agricultural product sorters market
The saffron processing line was so technically complex and extensive that some of its components alone had the potential to be commercialized in other industries. The sorter was one of these products that was quickly welcomed in the country’s dried fruit industry. By using artificial intelligence, we were able to add shape sorting capabilities to the sorters, which at that time was unrivaled even among imported machines for some products such as figs.
It was in 1403 when we realized the challenge that aflatoxin contamination had created for the country’s pistachio exports when a pistachio exporting company announced its need. After several months of research and development, we were the first Iranian company to succeed in adding the ability to separate seeds suspected of contamination to our sorters. At that time, there were only a few European machines in Iran, priced at several hundred thousand dollars, that were capable of sorting pistachio aflatoxin, and many pistachio industry activists were practically left without this technology.
The future we seek to build...
More than 10 years have passed since Vali started its operations, and today Vali products have been successfully installed and launched in different regions of the country. Ten years ago we were young and bold, now we are grown and experienced. With the addition of new specialties to the group, we are constantly growing, and today we are proudly considered one of the most promising Iranian knowledge-based companies in the field of advanced agricultural and industrial equipment and solutions.
Vali is not a startup copied from a foreign company! Vali’s story is about young people who are looking for complex and unsolved problems in their country to provide their customers with the smartest solutions by combining new technologies and unique innovations. If you also have an unsolved problem that you think Vali can help you solve, we are waiting for you with open arms.
