A British Columbia ag tech firm providing robots that harvest and package deal mushrooms has raised $29 million from buyers. 4AG Robotics has developed robots with “suction grippers” that use laptop imaginative and prescient to pluck farmed mushrooms, trim their stems and field them up for retail gross sales.
The corporate, which is predicated northeast of Vancouver within the small metropolis of Salmon Arm, launched in 1999 as TechBrew Robotics. Two years in the past it rebranded and raised $12.7 million. The corporate has roughly 70 staff, in line with its web site.
“In simply two and a half years, we’ve gone from asking farms to trial our know-how to having deposits for over 40 extra robots. As one of many first firms to totally automate the human hand in produce harvesting, we’re ushering in a brand new period for mushroom farming,” mentioned Sean O’Connor, 4AG’s CEO, in a press release.
4AG’s robotic harvesting platform is being utilized by mushroom farmers in Canada, Eire and Australia, and it’s increasing into within the U.S. and the Netherlands.
For many years, the corporate had addressed wide-ranging automation challenges, together with in logistics, meals and building purposes, previous CEO and present president Mike Boudreau defined in 2022. Round 2020, he mentioned, the enterprise realized the potential for mushroom harvesting and targeted on that problem.
The mushroom sector is predicted to be price greater than $70 billion by the top of the last decade, in line with 4AG, and labor is a big price driver.
The Collection B discovered was led by Astanor Ventures and Cibus Capital, with help from new investor Voyager Capital and participation from current buyers InBC, Emmertech, BDC Industrial Innovation Fund, Jim Richardson Household Workplace, Stray Canine Capital and Seraph Group.
“We had been interested in 4AG Robotics as a result of they’re the primary scalable robotic harvesting system we’ve seen, they’ve the profitable agtech enterprise mannequin of promoting on to the grower and so they’re the business’s clear chief, rising exceptionally quick, with 4x year-over-year income development,” mentioned Erik Benson, managing director of Seattle’s Voyager, by e mail.
Added Harry Briggs, companion at Astanor, in a press release: “We consider that, of all of the agricultural sectors, mushrooms are essentially the most poised for robotic options — and we consider that 4AG shouldn’t be solely the clear world chief at the moment, but additionally has the potential, because of AI advances and their wealthy picture knowledge, to drive up yields and scale back inputs throughout the business.”
Editor’s notice: Story corrected to explain the quantity raised in U.S. {dollars} as a substitute of Canadian {dollars}.
