Bloomfield Robotics Inc. has raised $1.8 million in its first funding round, with a Japanese manufacturer that’s one of the world’s largest tractor producers among the investors.
Kubota Corp., based in Osaka, Japan, made its first Pittsburgh investment, Mark DeSantis, Bloomfield CEO, said.
Other investors include high-net-worth individuals and two accelerators — Pax Momentum of Washington, D.C., and Thrive SBG in Los Angeles. Bloomfield connected with Kubota via Thrive, DeSantis said. Bloomfield was one of the 12 agtech companies in Thrive’s international cohort, and Kubota served as a partner.
“They were able to observe us up close through our progression in that program,” DeSantis said. “A dialogue commenced and resulted in this relationship.”
A Carnegie Mellon University spinout that uses artificial intelligence and cameras to monitor crop growth, Bloomfield's offices are on the South Side where nine of its 14 employees are based. Three are on the West Coast, and two are based in Paris. At present, Bloomfield is working with 18 vineyards — in the U.S., France and Italy — and a blueberry grower in Peru.
In addition to the new capital infusion, Bloomfield has also obtained $1.3 million in grants. The latest is $1 million from NASA, which is being awarded in three increments, two of which are due in 2022.
“In agtech, there’s a lot of looking at data as a way to meet the challenge of supplying food to the world,” DeSantis said. “There’s really no new farmable land — no new Iowa or Ukraine. It’s going to require us to get more production, more yield, from the available land and crops.”
That means getting more from each plant, vine or tree. And that's where data comes in.
“The trick in getting the data we use for our tools is to get it on the ground, up close, and Kubota makes tractors and farm equipment,” he continued.
Basically, Bloomfield’s technology can “hitch a ride, so to speak,” he said, installed on Kubota’s vehicles.
“I think they have about four million tractors around the world now,” he said. “That’s an efficient, low-cost way of collecting data. So it makes for a nice connection. We’re going to work together to try to realize this vision of being able to help every farmer get more per plant. It’s too early to say the mechanics of that, but it’s the beginning of a collaboration that will extend into the future.”
The NASA connection emerged in May. Bloomfield won a grant to develop a version of its camera to go into the international space station to monitor crops being grown in a greenhouse.
“It’s part of a program called Space Crops that will allow astronauts to travel great distances — they can’t carry enough food so they’d have to grow it,” DeSantis said. “The challenge is that someone has to watch the plants, like we do on Earth. So, in the next two years, we hope to have something to monitor crops in space. We have to be the only company in the world that can call a blueberry grower in Peru, a vineyard in Bordeaux and NASA as customers.”
DeSantis, a repeat entrepreneur, joined Bloomfield in late 2019. Part of his role is to raise capital and build connections. He has a track record for bringing new investors including angel networks and venture capitalists to the region, many of which subsequently wind up investing in other Pittsburgh companies. He has never hesitated to look to corporations, also called strategic investors, such as Kubota or, for a prior company, kWantera, GE Ventures, an arm of General Electric Co.
“Some people are reluctant about strategic investors, they think you can only approach them when you’re well along,” DeSantis said. “”That probably was true 10 or 15 years ago when you had to show up on the doorstep of a big company and be ready to go. That’s no longer the case. My prior experience with big companies is they’re ready to engage. The trick is knowing where to start the conversation. My point has been to really understand the strategy of that company — where are they going and how does that sync with where we’re going. That’s a dialogue.”
Given that so much of Bloomfield’s customer base is vineyards, it’s fun to point out that Kubota Tractors’ U.S. headquarters is in Grapevine, Texas. But Bloomfield’s investor is the Osaka-based parent company.
