September 29, 2021

By Lynda Kiernan-Stone, Global AgInvesting Media

Farming robotics startup Burro (formerly Augean Robotics) announced it has closed on a $10.9 million Series A led by Toyota Ventures and S2G Ventures, marking Toyota’s first investment in agriculture. 

Additional investors who took part in the round include F-Prime Capital and the Cibus Enterprise Fund, along with existing investors including Radicle Growth, and ffVC.

Founded in Philadelphia in 2017 by Charlie Anderson, Burro offers the only fully autonomous, plug-and-play collaborative farming robot on the market.

Burro’s platform features a unique patent pending approach called Pop Up Autonomy™ – a name reflecting how its autonomous people-scale robot works immediately out of the box by enabling every worker within an environment to become an operator. Burro’s robots do not require a centralized control or installation of complicated infrastructure – rather, they use computer vision and AI to learn “on the fly” to navigate autonomously “from A to B” while carrying various payloads.

This ability is becoming available at a critical time for growers. Farmers – especially those growing labor-intensive specialty crops such as grapes, berries, and nursery crops –  are facing ever greater challenges throughout their production cycles. It is these farmers in particular, who are widely un-mechanized, that employ 88 percent of the crop workers in the U.S.

However, due to the strenuous nature of the labor itself, tighter regulations, and rising wages, this workforce has declined by 40 percent over the past decade, driving growers to seek out systems that can reduce the labor needs. The only problem is that there is a lack of commercially available options. 

Enter Burro robots, the first ideation of a future where robots do the outdoor work that humans no longer want to, or can, do – effectively working collaboratively to force-multiply workers, while also creating a foundation for an automated future where robots can navigate anywhere, perceive everything, and have the dexterity to accomplish increasingly complex outdoor tasks.

Eventually the company is aiming to tackle the $1.2 trillion U.S. outdoor labor market, where automation can address some of today’s more challenging issues. 

“Many autonomy companies beginning in agriculture have focused first on autonomous tractors, autonomous weeding, and harvesting, where they try to comprehensively automate incredibly hard technical tasks, and often struggle to scale into a large market – we’ve started instead with collaborative people-scale robots that help people by moving heavy things around,” said Charlie Andersen, CEO, Burro.

“The beauty of this approach is that we can scale today around a ubiquitous pain point in the most labor-intensive areas of agriculture, while also allowing our platform to capture data and learn about many environments – providing the foundation for us to scale to countless other applications.”

Burro is scaling in the $3 billion table grape segment, and is looking to expand into berries and nursery crops. Today, Burro has 90 robots in table grape fields autonomously covering 100-300 miles per day, six days per week – instead of field workers walking several miles pushing a 250 pound-filled wheelbarrow of grapes in the heat. This now enables workers to stand in the shade picking or packing with a continuous flow of fruit out of the field, and transforms productivity with one Burro enabling six-plus people to harvest up to 48 percent more fruit per day for less than a two-month ROI.

With the capital from this round Burro plans to expand its fleet to more than 500 robots next year to meet the demand presented by existing and new customers. In support, the company stated it will dramatically increase the size of its team, while also expanding the capabilities of its product – such as adding the dexterity needed to pick grapes, and extending its mobility autonomy into nursery and berry markets. 

“Burro’s product is in high demand because the team is hyper-focused on understanding and solving real agriculture use cases in a way that is simple and accessible,” said Sanjeev Krishnan, managing director and chief investment officer, S2G Ventures. “We are thrilled to back Charlie and the team at Burro as they work side-by-side with growers to improve the social, environmental and economic outcomes of farm operations.”

– Lynda Kiernan-Stone is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She can be reached at lkiernan-stone@globalaginvesting.com.