April 20, 2021

By Lynda Kiernan, Global AgInvesting Media

Tortuga AgTech, an ag robotics startup singled out in 2019 by Philippe de Lapérouse and Mark Zavodnyik of HighQuest Consulting as a robotics company to watch, announced it has raised a $20 million Series A led by Lewis & Clark AgriFood.

Also participating in the round were Colorado Impact Fund (CIF), Root Ventures, Spero Ventures, Ceres Partners, AME Cloud Ventures, Grit Ventures, and Remus Capital.  

“The global market for ag robotics, estimated by industry analysts to be approximately $3 billion, is expected to increase to $12 to $13 billion over the next seven years,” said de Lapérouse and Zavodnyik.

“Confronted with a shrinking and more expensive labor force, production agriculture (including row crops, permanent and specialty crops, and indoor agriculture) is seeking out and adopting the use of robotics to address not only a shortage in qualified labor,” they noted, “but to improve the timeliness and effectiveness of decision-making based on massive amounts of data.”

With a mission to create a healthier society and “a thriving ecosystem through smarter farming”, Tortuga AgTech came out of stealth last year with the debut of its flexible and adaptable harvesting robot.

Initially launched to harvest high-value strawberries, the built-in flexibility of the technology enables the robot to adjust to work on diverse crops such as grapes, or even CEA-produced tomatoes. 

“Anything that is hand-harvested and grown in a structured or semi-structured environment is a target market for us,” Adamson told Colorado Biz last year. “In the pipeline: robots for other berries, cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers. It’s just a matter of chasing the right ones.”

Over the past three years, headed by co-founder and CEO Eric Adamson, Tortuga AgTech has worked collaboratively with farmers to hone its R&D, making significant headway toward its vision of fundamentally changing agricultural production models by introducing the robot-as-a-service. 

“While the national median annual cost of a U.S. farm worker in 2017 was $23,730 ($11.41 per hour), the median cost for farm labor in California, where the adoption of robots is experiencing the fastest growth in the U.S., is $20 per hour,” noted de Lapérouse and Zavodnyik.

“According to a California Farm Bureau Federation survey conducted in 2017, 55 percent of responding growers have experienced labor shortages in recent years. For a majority of growers who are growing high-value crops, such as berries and grapes, which are difficult to harvest mechanically, the labor shortage is particularly challenging.” Challenges that were only compounded by the global pandemic. 

Not only has Tortuga AgTech’s harvesting robot been able to alleviate farm labor challenges, which have been especially critical this past year through the pandemic, but the startup also offers farmers the ability to collect and leverage data that can be key to making decisions throughout the growing season. 

“Combining the use of robots with recent developments in artificial intelligence, growers can now mine massive volumes of data captured in the field to make precise, laser-like interventions in the field, resulting in reduced applications of inputs as well as supporting sustainability initiatives,” said de Lapérouse and Zavodnyik.

The capital gained through this round will be used by the company to meet various goals, including strengthening its operating model, fleshing out its team, and for the production of hundreds of robots which will be deployed in 2022 – a development that de Lapérouse and Zavodnyik see as a driver behind the acceleration of tech adoption.

“While agriculture throughout history has demonstrated that new technologies providing enhanced efficiency and labor productivity will be adopted rapidly, new technologies adopted from adjacent industries such as robots integrated with artificial intelligence promise to accelerate the pace of change, and revolutionize how food and crops are produced in ways we have yet to fully appreciate.”

– Lynda Kiernan is editor with GAI Media, and is managing editor and daily contributor for Global AgInvesting’s AgInvesting Weekly News and  Agtech Intel News, as well as HighQuest Group’s Oilseed & Grain News. She can be reached at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.