Root AI develops the Virgo, a produce-picking robot built with dexterity and soft grippers designed to handle multiple types of produce. Unlike many harvest robots focused on a single crop, Virgo is intended to adapt across plants through its grippers and software. The company says the first commercial units will focus on tomato harvesting, with future software updates planned to unlock new crops. Root AI already has two units deployed in California and plans to deploy additional robots in the U.S. and Canada later this year to meet COVID-19–driven demand. The startup announced a $7.2M seed round, bringing total funding to $9.5M. Investors in the seed include Rob May of PJC, First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman, Jason Calacanis, and Austin McChord of Outsiders Fund. Root AI builds mobile harvesting robots and software for indoor farms, initially focusing on tomatoes. Its first product is a robot that picks fruit, assesses crop health, prunes vines and manages ripening profiles. The robots use multiple cameras, 3D depth sensing and a customized convolutional neural network to detect fruit and measure ripeness, size and quality in real time on-device. Founders Josh Lessing and Ryan Knopf spun the company out of work at Soft Robotics and research from Harvard professor George Whiteside. Root AI raised $2.3 million to bring its first line of robotic harvesting and farm-optimization technologies to market. The company is running technology experiments with growers now and plans pilots next year as indoor farming acreage expands.

Total raised

$10M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Seed

Latest activity

Aug 2020