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Growth path? Advanced.Farm plans to continue to expand across crops. It has seamlessly adapted its strawberry technology for apple harvesting, and plans to further adapt its apple harvesting technology for stone fruits, namely peaches and plums.
Offering? Advanced.Farm offers fully autonomous harvesting robots for both strawberries and apples. Its BetterPick strawberry harvester has harvested more than two million strawberries in the past year, while its Robotic Apple Harvester has recently become available in Washington. In addition to robotic strawberry harvest, the company deployed several automated strawberry packlines in 2022 to complement its efforts in harvest. Business model? The company operates with a leasing for fixed fee business model, with pricing at $5,000 per month. This model allows it to maintain ownership of the machines, helping to continue to perfect the robots. Impact? Advanced.Farms’ autonomous harvesters can replicate human harvesting speed at 100lbs per hour and can work two shifts a day. Accordingly, when combining the packline and robotic harvest together, required labor falls by 50%. Planting and preparation: Poorer scalability across crop types means that fewer start-ups focus on planting and preparation. However, Agrointelli, a Danish company, has achieved significant market traction with more than 20 paying customers in more than 15 countries and 40-plus robots in service. Its technology is compatible with broccoli and lettuce and other row vegetables and tree nursery. The company also offers weeding and spraying capabilities as well as ridging and mowing as secondary activities.
Website? https://advanced.farm/ Contact details? info@advanced.farm
Advanced.Farms’ autonomous strawberry harvesting robot, BetterPick Figure 51: Advanced Farm – Interview spotlight
Like last year’s report, the start-ups were also ranked based on total funding raised to date (see Figure 52). These data show that, as in 2021, most start-ups are still in pre-venture or seed funding rounds, although many have also completed Series A funding. As would be expected, many start-ups with market traction (a high number of machines in service and paying customers) have completed Series A or B funding. In addition to venture capital funding, around 43 percent of the start-ups that participated in the survey also reported that they received a government grant.
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