A British Columbian ag tech company offering robots that harvest and package mushrooms has raised $29 million from investors. 4AG Robotics has developed robots with “suction grippers” that use computer vision to pluck farmed mushrooms, trim their stems and box them up for retail sales.
The company, which is based northeast of Vancouver in the small city of Salmon Arm, launched in 1999 as TechBrew Robotics. Two years ago it rebranded and raised $12.7 million. The company has roughly 70 employees, according to its website.
“In just two and a half years, we’ve gone from asking farms to trial our technology to having deposits for over 40 additional robots. As one of the first companies to fully automate the human hand in produce harvesting, we’re ushering in a new era for mushroom farming,” said Sean O’Connor, 4AG’s CEO, in a statement.
4AG’s robotic harvesting platform is being used by mushroom farmers in Canada, Ireland and Australia, and it’s expanding into in the U.S. and the Netherlands.
For decades, the company had addressed wide-ranging automation challenges, including in logistics, food and construction applications, past CEO and current president Mike Boudreau explained in 2022. Around 2020, he said, the business realized the potential for mushroom harvesting and focused on that challenge.
The mushroom sector is expected to be worth more than $70 billion by the end of the decade, according to 4AG, and labor is a significant cost driver.
The Series B found was led by Astanor Ventures and Cibus Capital, with support from new investor Voyager Capital and participation from existing investors InBC, Emmertech, BDC Industrial Innovation Fund, Jim Richardson Family Office, Stray Dog Capital and Seraph Group.
“We were attracted to 4AG Robotics because they’re the first scalable robotic harvesting system we’ve seen, they have the winning agtech business model of selling directly to the grower and they’re the industry’s clear leader, growing exceptionally fast, with 4x year-over-year revenue growth,” said Erik Benson, managing director of Seattle’s Voyager, by email.
Added Harry Briggs, partner at Astanor, in a statement: “We believe that, of all the agricultural sectors, mushrooms are the most poised for robotic solutions — and we believe that 4AG is not only the clear global leader today, but also has the potential, thanks to AI advances and their rich image data, to drive up yields and reduce inputs across the industry.”
Editor’s note: Story corrected to share amount raised in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian dollars.