“When we went backstage to speak about the pitches and choose a company to invest in, we walked into it with a certain vision and walked out of it with a different outcome,” said Sanjeev Krishnan, S2G Ventures’ chief investment officer and managing director. Krishnan was among the judges’ panel, which also included Kevin Andrew, chief farming officer at Vanguard International; Robby Barkley, president & CEO of Barkley Ag Enterprise; Cristina Rohr, vice president at S2G Ventures; Vic Smith, president & CEO of JV Smith Companies; and Matthew Walker, managing director at S2G Ventures. “The top two in the try, buy, deny poll were Augean and Bird Control Group. The audience was comprised mostly of Western Growers members and hearing how they felt led us to make offers to both companies,” said Krishnan. Though Bird Control Group was made an investment offer, officials decided to decline the deal at hand and are currently in discussion with S2G about other potential opportunities. Augean Robotics left the stage as the sole victor of the competition, receiving the funding needed to deploy more prototypes into field trials with growers. They plan to use any feedback they receive
2018 AgSharks judges with competition winner, Charlie Andersen of Augean Robotics
to fine tune their product toward early commercialization next year. The startup expects to deploy 100 robots in 2019. “With this capital from S2G and partnership and support from Western Growers, we can continue to scale and
create more value for the agriculture industry. We hear so much dialogue about robots, robots, robots, and we are looking forward to finally putting an automated solution into the hands of growers,” said Andersen.
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JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2019
Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com
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