With $8.4M raised, strawberry-picking robotics startup Traptic begins commercial deployment
We first covered Traptic back in 2019, when it appeared as a Battlefield finalist on stage at Disrupt SF. Today, the South Bay robotics startup is announcing some major progress. For starters, it began commercial deployment of its strawberry-picking mobile robot early this month.
Traptic tells TechCrunch that Blazer-Wilkinson, a top-five U.S. strawberry producer, began to deploy the technology in June, the system working in tandem with human pickers. That follows a pilot in 2020, when many agriculture companies were seeking assistance amid pandemic-related shortages.
Even prior to COVID-19, labor shortages have resulted in tremendous waste. According to Traptic’s figures, roughly 10% of U.S. strawberries rot in the field, unpicked, resulting in up to $300 million in waste, annually. During the pandemic, there was an even larger crunch, as H-2A workers suffered from restricted travel.
The company’s acceleration comes thanks to an unannounced $5 million Series A from Collaborative Fund, Homebrew Ventures and K9 Ventures that arrived in late-2019, before COVID-19 was on the world’s radar. “We used the recent funding to run a successful pilot,” cofounder and CEO Lewis Anderson tells TechCrunch, “design and build our commercial-scale machine, and start our first paid deployment.” The latest round followed an early-stage $3 million raise in 2017 and $400K the year prior. The company has raised $8.4 million in total.
