Agricultural tech startup Burro raised a $10.9 million Series A round to grow its fleet of 100 autonomous robots to 500.
Toyota Ventures and S2G Ventures, a fund specializing in investing in food and agriculture, led the round. F-Prime Capital, the Cibus Enterprise Fund, and existing investors like Radicle Growth and ffVC also participated. Formerly known as Augean Robotics, Burro has raised about $15 million since 2017, CEO Charlie Andersen said.
Burro’s robots are autonomous vehicles that use artificial intelligence to reduce human labor on farms by performing tasks such as transporting crops that can’t be picked or packed by machinery. The people-scale robots are similar to Disney’s WALL-E, Andersen said, helping to improve productivity while learning how to do tasks on their own.
Philadelphia-based Burro primarily works with growers of table grapes and has 100 robots deployed at farms in California’s San Joaquin Valley, one of the most agriculturally productive regions of the country.
“I think we are just scratching the surface of the marketplace in which we're operating today,” Anderson said.
He projects that the company will reach just over $1 million in revenue for 2021 with its fleet of 100, and he expects revenue figures to increase fivefold as the startup hits 500 robots next year. Burro charges about $12,000 for its robots, with an annual $2,100 subscription cost per robot for its autonomous programming.
Burro will also grow its staff of 21 to about 35 by the end of the year, Anderson said. The startup is hiring employees working in product management, technical team management, business development and engineering, and is looking to hire people in Greater Philadelphia.
Burro is also soon starting a pilot program to test the dexterity of its robots and their ability to harvest delicate fruits, the CEO said. There is already autonomous picking and packing for fruits like apples and strawberries, but not as much for fruits like grapes.
By adding a picking and packing capability to the Burro robot, it can increase the number of uses for the robot in other industries, Andersen said.
“A product that can harvest but also inherently do a number of other really interesting tasks,” he said.
Andersen likened the Burro robots to the personal computer in 1978, in that the robots have a host of use cases that the startup likely hasn’t thought of yet. While the product is currently being used as ground transportation for table grapes, Burro has been approached by companies looking to use them as security vehicles and towing vehicles or to attach lamps on the robot to kill certain types of mildew, he said.
“Imagine you're selling a guitar,” Andersen said. “We are seeing people riff on it in more and more ways, leading us to believe that there's more demand and kind of exposing what that demand actually is.”
