Agriculture is poised to be one of the next big robotics categories. Everyone needs to eat, and much of what we eat in this part of the world comes from large farms. Farm work is hard on the body and requires long hours in sometimes extreme environments. It can also be difficult to recruit and retain staff in a category that often relies on migrant workers.
We've seen several startups try to automate field work over the last decade. It can be a difficult space to find a foothold in, and several of those startups ultimately ended up selling out to tractor giant John Deere, which seems determined to completely own the category.
For the most part, young companies that venture into this field start with a single goal, such as weeding or picking apples. Founded right at the beginning of the pandemic, based in the Bay Area Farm-ng has cast a much wider net. The company's first system, Amiga, is modular, allowing it to be implemented in a wide range of tasks. The company says it came up with the concept of modularity while working with farmers in the Pajaro Valley and Salinas Valley on California's vast central coast.
“This naturally led to a modular system, like Legos for our agricultural customers, that allowed them to build their own solutions at extremely low cost,” Nvidia vet and newly appointed CTO Claire Delaunay tells TechCrunch. “We strive to make our technology accessible to the farmer, whether mechanically easy to adapt, maintain or extend the software to meet his needs (…) Having a modular approach is not new in the agricultural space. Tractors are very modular and there is a large set of distributors and integrators capable of customizing your tractor for a type of crop and practice, and the specific characteristics of your tools.”
This morning, Farm-ng announces a $10 million Series A. The round, led by Acre Venture Partners, follows the seed round last March. The startup has deployed around 100 Amiga units in less than 18 months. Part of the new funding will go toward increasing production at the company's Watsonville manufacturing plant (in the aforementioned Pajaro Valley).
Farm-ng promises a quick return on investment for systems deployed in the field.
“The integration of Amigas into agricultural operations has resulted in significant time and cost savings for our customers,” says Delaunay. “In a customer study, we saw that Amiga reduced weekly labor time in a variety of use cases, including seeding, weeding and mulching. In this study we saw that the number of weekly working hours was reduced by between 50% and 80%. (…) More concrete data is anticipated after one or two growing seasons, but, anecdotally, our customers are excited about the opportunities that a more optimized operation provides.”
