London-based international farm equipment maker CNH Industrial NV has invested in Davis startup Advanced Farm Technologies Inc., and the two companies plan to work together on research and development as well as commercialization.
Advanced Farm designs and makes autonomous robots that use sensors and cameras to pick ripe fruit in the field or orchard.
Advanced Farm engineers and designers will be touring CNH Industrial (NYSE: CNHI) factories in the Americas, said co-founder Kyle Cobb.
The corporate venture capital investment will provide more than just monetary support, Cobb said. It will also brings the Davis startup inside the industry to see what they want and can deliver in the future. The company has had experience with previous corporate venture capital from equipment companies. Previous investments have come from Kubota Corp., an Osaka, Japan-based maker of farm machinery, and Yamaha Motor Co. Ltd. of Iwata, Japan.
"They are executing on a 10- to 20-year timeline," Cobb said of Advanced Farm's corporate investors.
CNH Industrial is based outside of London, and has manufacturing all over the world. It makes farm and construction equipment under the brands New Holland and Case IH. Case IH is the farm equipment remnant division of the defunct International Harvester.
Advanced Farm's corporate venture capital investments in the past have "added a ton of value to our business," Cobb said.
The total outside investment into Advanced Farm now stands at $40 million, Cobb said. He declined to disclose the amount that CNH Industrial invested.
In 2021, Advanced Farm raised a $25 million funding round led by Los Altos-based Catapult Ventures that included Impact Venture Capital of Sacramento, Kubota and Yamaha.
Advanced Farm designs, fabricates, builds and assembles its equipment in Yolo County, on a couple farm properties just outside the city limits of Davis.
The company’s robots address the critical shortage of labor to hand-pick fruit that can't be mechanically harvested by tractors or non-smart equipment. Its equipment has been picking strawberries on commercial farms for four years, and started picking apples last year. The machines can work around the clock. The company is also expanding into picking stone fruit, Cobb said.
The Advanced Farm 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 ripe fruit to pick. It uses color sensors to determine ripeness before picking the fruit with gentle grippers.
The apple picker is on a taller chassis than the strawberry picker, but uses the same optical equipment, software and mechanical arms.
Cobb declined to disclose Advanced Farm's revenue or what it costs to build its machines. The company employs more than 70 people, mostly in Davis.
Advanced Farm was founded in 2017, and delivered its first prototype in 2020. The company won a Sacramento Region Innovation Award last year.
