Strawberries are the most popular berry in the U.S. for both consumers and farmers alike. They’re also some of the most pesticide-reliant fruits and consistently top the Environmental Working Group’s “Dirty Dozen” list of the most contaminated produce.
San Luis Obispo, California-based TRIC Robotics thinks it can help strawberry farmers reduce chemical use with the help of UV light and robots.
The startup built a fleet of robots that use UV-C light, a form of ultraviolet light that is largely blocked by the earth’s atmosphere, to kill bacteria and damage pest populations. The tractor-sized autonomous robots can treat up to 100 acres and also use vacuums designed to suck up bug residue without hurting crops.
The company runs its robots at farms overnight as a service, as opposed to selling them directly to farmers, because, while harder to scale, this model seemed like the right one to start getting traction quickly, Adam Stager, the co-founder and CEO of TRIC, told TechCrunch.
“We worked a lot with the farmers to understand the right way to launch the technology and what was the right business model,” Stager said. “We found out that a lot of the farmers pay for pest disease control as a service, so they have a company come in and do the sprays. And what we’ve been doing is just replacing that as a service model.”
While Stager said the company has been very focused on what farmers want, it wasn’t always that way. In fact, TRIC wasn’t even focused on agriculture to begin with.
Stager launched the company in 2017 after completing his PhD in robotics. The company was initially focused on 3D-printed robots for SWAT teams. In 2020, Stager decided to pivot into an area he thought would have more impact and started focusing on agriculture.
“I really just wanted to answer the question, if you were to die tomorrow, would you be happy with what you accomplished in your life?” Stager said. “I was like, okay, I really need to do something impactful that can help a lot of people to feel value for myself. I kind of stumbled into agriculture on that journey, [and realized] that’s a place where we can impact so many people, just about everybody.”
Stager reached out to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to see if there was any technology they were working on that he could help commercialize, knowing from his PhD program that a lot of great technology never leaves the lab.
He got connected to a USDA program that brings folks like Stager and scientists, who haven’t yet commercialized their work, together. This outreach connected him to the UV light technology that became the basis for TRIC’s robotics.
“We loaded two robots that we built in my garage on top of the SUV,” Stager said about him and co-founder Vishnu Somasundaram. “We had two connections that the USDA helped us build with farmers that were willing to give us just a tiny little piece of land in 2021 and that’s really the beginning of when this company started. It was a cross-country journey of Airbnb surfing for eight months where we were deploying two robots and getting this amazing data with these farmers.”
Now the company, which also counts Ryan Berard as its third co-founder, works with four large strawberry producers, has deployed nine robots, and has three more robots on the way.
TRIC Robotics recently raised a $5.5 million seed round led by Version One Ventures with participation from Garage Capital, Todd and Rahul Capital, and Lucas Venture Group, among other investment firms and individual angels.
The company plans to put the money toward continuing to build out its fleet of autonomous robots, and TRIC eventually wants to move into other types of crops as well.
“I think there is going to be a really, really bright future for [agriculture] tech,” Stager said. “I just think people should know that things are really headed in a great direction, and there’s really a lot of exciting things to come.”
