Robotic Automation For Farming: Our Investment In Root AI
I first met Josh and Ryan from Root AI back in 2018 when they were getting started with Root AI, and was impressed with their backgrounds and experience. But at the time, I knew nothing about indoor farming.
I’ve been very interested in robots for some time now because, with all the standardization in so many parts of the robot tech stack, it’s easier than ever to get a robotics company off the ground. But you need the right application. Indoor farming is one of those applications.
As I learned about this industry, I found out it is massive. Indoor farms are growing at a rapid rate for two reasons. The first is yield. An indoor tomato farm grows 24x as many tomatoes per acre as an outdoor farm, because the grower can control all the weather variables indoors. The second is you can grow produce year round to always have a predictable supply for grocers.
Every customer, and thus every grocer, wants year round produce that is high quality and controlled. Indoor farming provides that. It’s the future of farming.
However, when I dug into the industry, the single biggest problem was… labor. Or, lack of labor, more appropriately. Multiple farm CEOs told me the growth of their business was gated on the ability to hire people to pick the produce. No matter what they paid, they couldn’t find enough people.
Enter Root. The company makes the world’s leading multi-produce picking robot. Using machine vision to detect when something is ripe, and a special gripper, that involves multiple patents and years of innovation, to grasp hard enough to pull the produce off the vine but soft enough not to damage it.
The benefits of this aren’t just labor saving. Root can tell if something should be picked a little earlier or later depending on where it is going to be shipped. It can target product of a certain size or quality. The data set the company is building will be daily video of every piece of product on multiple farms across the world — something valuable in many different ways.
After following the company for years we were incredibly excited to lead the Seed round the company is announcing today, and the syndicate we’ve built with Josh Kopelman from First Round, Ryan Moore from Accomplice, Jason Calcanis from Launch, and Austin McChord from Outsiders Fund. So congratulations to Josh and Ryan and the team. The whole PJC team is excited to be a partner on your journey.
