Root AI, a Woburn-based robotics company that has developed a specialized crop-picking robot, has brought in $7.2 million in seed funding.
The oversubscribed round was led by Rob May of PJC, with participation from Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, Jason Calacanis, Austin McChord of Outsiders Fund, Ryan Moore of Accomplice and Rob Leclerc of AgFunder.
Root AI was co-founded at the beginning of 2018 by Josh Lessing and Ryan Knopf, both veterans of Bedford startup Soft Robotics. Its main product is a robot named Virgo, which is capable of picking specialty crops like tomatoes, cucumbers and berries—fragile foods that normally need to be picked by hand.
"We wanted to build a robot that replicated a lot of the dexterity and strategy that a human applies when touching, interacting with, caring for plants, and have that in the form of a robotic system," Lessing told BostInno. "Beyond that, farmers could use the artificial intelligence on the platform to start driving a lot more insights on the farm, so that every single system out in the field was the eyes and ears of the master grower. We can actually start driving better outcomes that bring more wealth to farmers, more food in the supply chain and more food delivered on a lower input, so it's better for the environment."
Root AI may just be getting off the ground, but its vision is ambitious: to essentially fuel another agricultural revolution by digitizing and automating the food economy.
Lessing sees a future in which Virgo is deployed at agricultural facilities outside of major metros—New York City, Chicago, San Francisco—each one of them simultaneously producing even numbers of different kinds of produce. He envisions a food economy fueled by that new infrastructure, one in which grocery stores across the U.S. and eventually around the world are stocked with fresh, local, cheap produce, all picked by Virgo.
"The food supply chain is one of the least digitized portions of the global economy," Lessing said. "There are lots of clear applications of new technology, and when you deploy them, you can fundamentally improve people's lives. Continuity in the food supply, predictability, lower costs to increase accessibility—that benefits everyone."
So far, Root AI has conducted tests in California, Maine, New York and Ohio, as well as Canada and the Netherlands. With the new funding, Root AI plans to begin scaling, hiring for both core technology development and field operations. Lessing said he wants to see Virgo deployed across North America within the next 12 months and in Europe beyond that.
Root AI's fundraise also comes at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has driven a labor shortage at American farms. The pandemic delayed the arrival of seasonal immigrants who normally help harvest U.S. wheat, for example, reportedly leaving farmers to depend on high school students, school bus drivers, laid-off oilfield workers and others to run machines that bring in the crop.
"If you can have an automatic food supply chain, you've solved one of humanity's biggest problems," Lessing said. "People need food, they need shelter, and they need medicine. If we can build an infrastructure that sustainably produces inexpensive, accessible food, we've solved a fundamental problem of humanity."
