When Brandon Contino and co-founder Dan Chi were developing Four Growers’ produce-harvesting robots, they practically lived in a greenhouse for an entire year. They coded at a small desk tucked in the back corner and discovered that fertilizer bags ca be comfortable beds.
“We actually started just running everything off a laptop, and I would be there in the row coding. [Chi] would be making changes mechanically,” Contino, now CEO, told TechCrunch. “We’d run it then we’d make code changes, we’d redevelop, we’d go back in and run it again. So, it was a very fun time just living at the farm basically.”
The result was Four Growers, which builds robots designed to autonomously harvest plants in greenhouses. The robots are programmed to identify produce at the right level of ripeness — which varies depending on a farmer’s needs — by using multiple stereo cameras to see the crops and help maneuver the robot’s arms around nonripe fruit on the vine. The tech currently works with tomatoes and will be commercially available to harvest other crops like cucumbers in the near future, Contino said.
Contino’s path to building agtech robotics wasn’t a fluid one. He entered college interested in neural prosthetics. He later pivoted to water sensors and water scarcity after realizing he didn’t want to end up with a career working on cyborgs, he said. Water scarcity led him to farms, but after talking to farmers, he realized robotics could help farmers in a bigger way.
“We were actually cold calling a bunch of different greenhouse farmers. We were really asking them about all their challenges, and we always heard that labor was the number one pain point for them,” Contino said. “And when you talk to outdoor farms, you hear the exact same thing.”
Having enough labor to harvest crops is crucial because if crops can’t be harvested when they are ready, they rot and result in lost profits for the farm. The National Association of State Departments of Agriculture’s 2024 labor report said the industry is facing a “critical shortage” of workers, and it won’t get better anytime soon.
Contino said they were intentional about focusing on greenhouse farms. Unlike outdoor farms, greenhouses can grow almost all year round, be closer to their end consumer, and are more efficient than outside farms, Contino said. They also harvest on a much more frequent schedule than outdoor farms, which makes them a good candidate to buy tech.
Four Growers was officially founded in 2018 and launched the current iteration of its robots in 2023. The company now works with five customers, and its robots have picked millions of tomatoes.
The Pittsburgh-based company just raised a $9 million Series A round led by Basset Capital with participation from Y Combinator, Ospraie Ag Science, and other existing investors. The company has raised a total of $15 million in venture funding. Contino said that the funding will be used to build more robots, as they aren’t sure they can keep up with demand.
The timing for this announcement comes just a few weeks after large, and well-capitalized, indoor farming startup Bowery Farms had to cease operations as a result of crop diseases and tight margins that didn’t leave much room for error.
Contino said that he wants all companies in this sector to succeed but added that vertical farms are particularly challenging and expensive. Contino said they looked into vertical farming before launching Four Growers and determined that the better market opportunity was to build tech for existing farms as opposed to trying to launch one on their own.
There are quite a few companies looking to help make farms more efficient through robotic harvesting, including Carbon Robotics, which has raised $143 million in venture capital. Blue River Technology and Bear Flag Robotics are both farm robotics companies that raised venture capital before being acquired by John Deere. Seso is an agtech startup that is tackling the industry’s labor shortage through a different lens: making it easier for farms to bring on migrant workers.
Contino said that the company is working to expand its technology beyond just harvesting and is looking to expand into outdoor farms in the coming years.
“It’s not really a labor replacement. It’s more of an augmentation,” Contino said. “As the labor force shrinks, and there’s less people willing to do it, it’s putting them to more comfortable positions and allowing one person to be able to do a lot more.”