Billerica-based Harvest Automation announced Tuesday the closing of an $11.75 million Series C round of funding led by Mousse Partners Limited. Existing investors Life Sciences Partners, Cultivian, Founder Collective, Entrée Capital and MassVentures also participated in the round.
Ed Zysik, VP at Mousse Partners, will be joining the Harvest Automation board of directors.
The funding will be used to further commercialize the HV-100 robot, nicknamed Harvey, which sort of looks like a cleaner, headless, rudimentary version of WALL-E.
The Harvest robots are meant to help nurseries, farms and greenhouses automate the process of moving, organizing and consolidating potted plants.
As anyone who has ever worked at a nursery will tell you, this is easily one of the most repetitive and physically tasking processes in the business. The robots can do this job autonomously, thereby freeing up valuable manpower to be used on other tasks. Harvest believes its robots can cut down on physical labor by 40 percent.
Harvest Automation, formerly known as Q Robotics, was founded by former iRobot employees and a CERN scientist in 2007.
In a press release John Kawola, CEO of Harvest Automation, expressed his enthusiasm about today's announcement:
We are seeing strong product validation with first customers and are excited to continue our efforts to bring smart, mobile, adaptive robotics into agriculture, a market that is not only large in scale, but could significantly benefit by deploying automation to work alongside people.
This latest investment round brings Harvest Automation's total funding to $23.5 million.
