A budding Pittsburgh agriculture-tech startup has grown its roots into new space in Lawrenceville amid a need for additional room for its employees and its robotics-based tech.
Bloomfield Robotics Inc. has moved from a co-working space in the South Side to Lawrenceville, a neighborhood that's become affectionately named Robotics Row in recent years due to the prevalence of other robotics-based companies in the area. It's now taking up a little under 5,000 square feet of space on Smallman Street formerly occupied by Edge Case Research .
The startup plans to use its expanded footprint for the continued build-out of its custom imaging tech that's powered by artificial intelligence, cameras and other sensors that are then used by farmers to monitor and track individual crops throughout a plant's lifespan. Bloomfield claims this level of monitoring allows farmers to have a digital twin of their crops that Bloomfield touts as being at a level of inspection that's never been done before given the scale it's able to do this at across the hundreds of acres of farmland where its customers use the tech.
"It's a beautiful space," Mark DeSantis, CEO of Bloomfield, said. "It gives us the size we need to do everything we need to do. We like the location and it really has all the things we need. We had shared space previously, which was great; a good way to start a company, kept our costs low. But now it's time to get our own space because we've added some people. It was a little crowded as well where we were previously."
Bloomfield designs the cameras used in its robotics systems here in Pittsburgh before it sends those blueprints to a company in Philadelphia for its manufacture. Those parts are then sent back to Pittsburgh for testing before being shipped to its customers around the world.
DeSantis said the company's full-time employee count stands at 17 workers. Its Pittsburgh workers report to its new office three days a week and work remotely the other days. The company also has employees in the Napa Valley region of California as well as in France. Its customer base touches these countries as well as Italy and Peru.
Bloomfield is expected to bring in just under $1 million in revenue this year, DeSantis said, though several factors yet to be realized could swing that figure up considerably should they pan out. The company's tech is currently tailored for grape inspection and monitoring on vineyards, though DeSantis teased future specialty crop capabilities to come in the near future. It's also setting its sights on expanding its customer base in Europe and Latin America as well as entering into Asian markets.
In June, Bloomfield Robotics won the inaugural Future of Life Online Challenge from Boston-based and global cloud services provider Akamai Technologies Inc.
