Burro produces an autonomous cart system that moves crops around the field, marketed as a collaborative, people-scale robot to help with heavy lifting. Its core technology, which the company calls "pop-up autonomy," can navigate spaces without pre-training. The company already has about 90 robots operating in the field, moving table grapes and covering roughly 100–300 miles a day, six days a week. Burro positions its product as a scalable alternative to attempting full automation of tractors or harvesting, focusing instead on augmenting human workers. The company plans to scale production for existing and new customers and aims to have more than 500 robots deployed during 2022. Interest in agtech robotics has accelerated amid pandemic-driven labor shortages, which Burro has leveraged by testing its technology in real-world conditions. Augean Robotics develops Burro, an autonomous, collaborative robotic platform that uses computer vision and AI to navigate farms and automate in-field transport. The company sells robots-as-a-service to growers of labor-intensive crops (table grapes, blueberries, cherry tomatoes, nursery plants) who use Burro as a virtual conveyor belt to free workers for higher-value tasks. Augean says its robots can increase productivity by up to 30% and are intended to lay a foundation for greater autonomy through proprietary datasets. The raise will be used to accelerate commercialization of Burro and to develop the datasets needed to enable further autonomy. The company was founded in 2017 and is based in Philadelphia. Several pilots and awards (including winning the AgSharks Competition) support its commercialization trajectory, with a target of widespread commercial availability by the end of 2019.

Total raised

$12M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Sep 2021