RadioBDC Logo
Miracle Mile | Cold War Kids Listen Live
 
 
Text size – +

Harvest Automation raises $7.8 million more for plant-toting robots

Posted by Scott Kirsner November 18, 2011 08:00 AM
  • E-mail

    • E-mail this article

    Invalid E-mail address
    Invalid E-mail address

    Sending your article

    Your article has been sent.

E-mail this article

Invalid email address
Invalid email address

Sending your article

Your article has been sent.

harvestbot.png

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist


Harvest Automation likes to say it is in the "automated material handling" business. The company's solution is "flexible and scalable," "fault tolerant," and "intuitive."

But it's a lot more descriptive to say that the Billerica company is breeding an army of robotic farmhands. The current generation are designed to lug around potted plants as they grow, but Harvest believes that as much as 40 percent of the manual labor performed in the agricultural industry today could be done by bots. And investors seem to be persuaded that it's time to modernize farms and nurseries: Harvest is planning to announce today that it has raised an additional $7.8 million in funding. The new round is being led by Entrée Capital of London and Tel Aviv. (I shot a video of the company's earliest prototypes in 2008, and wrote in 2010 about their initial round of funding, which totaled $5.3 million.)

Harvest chief executive Charlie Grinnell says that this summer, the company packed a van with three of their prototype bots and traveled to eleven nurseries and greenhouses around the country for, well, field trials. "All eleven growers gave us deposits on their first purchases, which was really encouraging," he says.

The new funding will help get Harvest's product launched sometime in 2012, Grinnell says. Harvest is targeting a price of between $25,000 and $50,000 per unit. The company has 30 employees, and is building a new indoor test facility for its robo-laborers near its Billerica headquarters.

Here's a recent Wired story on Harvest with the clever headline, "These May Be the Droids Farmers are Looking For." It includes the video below...

  • E-mail

    • E-mail this article

    Invalid E-mail address
    Invalid E-mail address

    Sending your article

    Your article has been sent.

On Facebook

Subscribe via e-mail

Get Innovation Economy updates via e-mail. Enter your address and click 'Subscribe':

More from Scott

about the blogger

About Scott Kirsner Scott Kirsner was part of the team that launched Boston.com in 1995, and has been writing a column for the Globe since 2000. His work has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Newsweek, and Variety. Scott is also the author of the books "Fans, Friends & Followers" and "Inventing the Movies," was the editor of "The Convergence Guide: Life Sciences in New England," and was a contributor to "The Good City: Writers Explore 21st Century Boston." Scott also helps organize several local events on entrepreneurship, including the Nantucket Conference and Future Forward. Here's some background on how Scott decides what to cover, and how to pitch him a story idea.

Events

May 16 & 17: Convergence Forum on Life Sciences
Speakers from Bristol-Myers, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and Biogen Idec talk about the next ten years of the biopharma business. Plus, journalist David Ewing Duncan on radical life extension. (I'm hosting.)

May 22: MIT Sloan CIO Symposium
Chief information officers from Guess, Haemonetics, Intel and other companies talk discuss "architecting the enterprise of the future."

June 25: TEDxBoston
The oldest and biggest of the locally-organized TED events is back, at the Seaport World Trade Center. Tickets are free, but tough to get. Also streams on the web and airs on WBUR.

archives

links we like