Agriculture is poised to be one of the next big robotics categories. Everyone has to eat and a lot of what we eat in this part of the world comes from big 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 a number of startups attempt to automate fieldwork over the past decade. It can be a tough space to get a foothold in, and some of these startups have ended up selling to tractor giant John Deere, which seems intent on completely owning the category.
For the most part, new companies in the field start out with a single focus, like, say, weeding or apple picking. It was 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, the Amiga, is modular, allowing it to be developed for a wide range of tasks. The company says it hit on the modular concept 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 farm customers, that allowed them to build their own solutions at extremely low cost,” Nvidia vet and new CTO Claire Delaunay tells TechCrunch. “We try to make our technology accessible to a farmer, whether it’s mechanically easy to adapt, maintain or extend the software to suit his needs […] Having a modular approach is not new in the ag space. Tractors are very modular, and there is a large pool of distributors and integrators able to customize your tractor for a type of crop and practices, as well as the specifics of your implements.”
This morning, Farm-ng is announcing a $10M Series A. The round, led by Acre Venture Partners, follows last March’s first round. 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 (in the aforementioned Pajaro Valley) manufacturing plant.
Farm-ng promises a quick return on investment for systems deployed in the field.
“Integrating Amigas into farming operations has resulted in significant time and cost efficiencies for our customers,” says Delaunay. “In a customer study, we saw the Amiga reduce weekly work time in various use cases such as seeding, weeding and compost spreading. In this study we saw the number of weekly hours worked drop by 50% – 80%. […] More concrete data is awaited after one to two growing seasons, but anecdotally our customers have been excited about the opportunities a more streamlined operation provides.”
