Four Growers, a Turtle Creek-based agtech startup, raises $9M to keep picking tomatoes, cucumbers with robots

By Evan Robinson-Johnson / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Four Growers started with cucumbers and tomatoes. Soon it could tackle the full salad.

“We actually have some designs and concepts for how we could do lettuce as well,” said cofounder and chief executive Brandon Contino.

For now, the Turtle Creek-based agtech startup is focused on turning $9 million in fresh fundraising into commercial success at farms around the world — from Brazil to Australia.

“Very soon the sun will not set on robot harvesting,” Mr. Contino said.

The most recent Series A, led by Bassett Capital, builds on a previous raise of $6 million from Y Combinator and other venture funds. Since the company spun out of the University of Pittsburgh in 2018, it’s been a slog of slow, low-cost development, Mr. Contino said. “Now that we've got it working, and it's really been proven, it's now ramping up the production.”

Four Growers’ main robot, GR-100, harvests produce in greenhouses, which makes it easier to test and iterate, and also means that the bot can operate almost continuously. There are still hurdles though. “Making it cost effective for not only our customers but the consumers is an incredibly difficult challenge,” Mr. Contino said.

Its young team of about 16 has been helped by seasoned engineers at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University. They also participated in the John Deere Startup Collaborative, an accelerator program that also helped launch the self-driving farm equipment firm Burro in Philadelphia.

“They're breaking down some barriers and opening up more opportunities for people to think differently about how these crops are grown and harvested,” said David Sanchez, a mentor to Four Growers and an engineering professor at Pitt. “It’s very exciting to see.”

While specialty farms are becoming increasingly digital, few systems are built to actually reach out and grab produce. Mr. Contino sees GR-100 as a tool that will ultimately help reduce the cost of fruits and vegetables — much like the combine harvester did for commodity crops like corn, wheat and soy.

“There's actually this flaw in the economic system right now where the healthy foods are more expensive because [the specialty farms sector] hasn't benefited from those same technological advancements,” he said.

To take the system out of greenhouses and into the field, Four Growers might eventually consider partnering with a major equipment maker like John Deere or Kubota. Mr. Contino said those companies are also becoming more interested in the greenhouse space.

The new funding should help Four Growers scale in North America, Europe and Australia. Their closest farms to Pittsburgh are currently in Ohio and New York. Burro is similarly focused on larger farms, outside the state. As is Kubota, which recently acquired Lawrenceville-based Bloomfield Robotics. The growth of all three firms has drawn attention from growers in South America, who recently toured the region during the AI Horizons summit in October.

Four Growers, Bloomfield and a third competitor, Moss Robotics, were all part of the third annual Pittsburgh Robotics Discovery Day on Wednesday. Pravir Das, hardware lead for Moss, gave a similar read out as Mr. Contino on the growth of agtech.

“Now you can make something made in Pittsburgh and take it to New Zealand where a farmer has never seen ... all this other tech before,” he said.

And, crucially, he added: “it actually works.”