A Davis ag-tech company that's been perfecting robots to pick strawberries and other produce has raised $25 million in an investment round led by venture capital firms and corporate investors.
Advanced Farm Technologies Inc. introduced its technology two years ago — a machine that uses four onboard robots with custom cameras to find and pick ripe strawberries.
“Nearly every piece of fresh fruit and vegetable is picked by hand,” Advanced Farm President and co-founder Kyle Cobb told the Business Journal. “We are automating the toughest tasks in farming.”
Advanced Farm will use the investment to advance its strawberry harvesting equipment and to develop technologies for other fruits and vegetables, Cobb said.
The machines address the growing shortage of farmworkers available to harvest food, he said, adding that it is a potential $40 billion market.
The “series B” funding round was led by Los Altos-based Catapult Ventures and included all the investors in Advanced Farm's previous “series A” venture capital round. Those included Kubota Corp., an Osaka, Japan-based maker of farm machinery; Yamaha Motor Corp. of Iwata, Japan; and Impact Venture Capital of Sacramento.
Catapult Ventures invests in companies developing robotics and automation paired with artificial intelligence.
Advanced Farm Technologies was founded in 2017. It received its first funding of nearly $2 million in 2018, and delivered its first prototype two years later. The company got its "series A" funding round of $7.5 million in 2019. Advanced Farm is based in a barn just outside the city limits of Davis. The company works with the strawberry breeding and engineering programs at the University of California Davis, Cobb said.
Advanced Farm currently has 35 employees. It plans to double its workforce over the next couple of years, Cobb said. The company is currently hiring software engineers, firmware engineers and mechanical engineers, along with technicians and field-based positions.
“It is gratifying to have the ongoing support and commitment from our early investors in this funding round. It reflects all of our team’s hard work to develop and bring our TX Strawberry Harvester to the market,” Cobb said in a news release. “Our success is also a testament to our grower partners in strawberries and apples who work with us to find creative ways to introduce automation into their ranches today while giving us the feedback we need to rapidly iterate and improve the tech.”
Working alongside manual harvest crews, the Advanced Farm TX Robotic Strawberry Harvester automatically senses and picks red, ripe fruit from in-soil strawberry beds. It uses cameras of the company's own design that refresh many times per second to find the fruit. It uses color sensors to determine ripeness before picking the fruit with gentle grippers, Cobb said.
The harvester can work autonomously 24 hours a day.
Cobb declined to disclose Advanced Farm's revenue. He said the company currently has $70 million in customer commitments to buy its equipment.
“The Advanced Farm team demonstrated tremendous discipline with the earlier fundraising, making $10 million go a very long way in developing and commercializing its technology quickly and creating the foundation needed to go to market,” said Rouz Jazayeri, managing partner of Catapult Ventures, in a news release. “With this latest investment round, the company can scale its team and robotic technology, with an eye toward expanding market share and adapting its technology for new crops, to deliver on the promise of automated harvesting for 21st-century farming.”
Advanced Farm designs, fabricates, builds and assembles its equipment in Davis, and plans to stay in the area as it ramps up production, Cobb said. The company has a “nice pipeline for developing talent,” from UC Davis, both from the engineering and agriculture schools, and also from the university’s robotics teams.
Advanced Farm is also working on a machine to pick apples, which can be a dangerous job for field workers because it requires ladders.
