Harvesting robot company receives £1.5m investment

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Elbow Beach Capital has made a £1.5m investment into Fieldwork Robotics, a Cambridge-based company developing harvesting robots.

Over £60m worth of crops are due to be wasted by UK farms this year due to labour shortages
Over £60m worth of crops are due to be wasted by UK farms this year due to labour shortages - Fieldwork Robotics

An ongoing Seedrs round which opened to new investors today (August 10, 2023) is expected to raise an additional £600,000.

Initially focusing on soft fruits, including raspberries, Fieldwork Robotics has developed advanced, AI-supported harvesting robots to help solve seasonal worker shortages, increase farm efficiency and reduce food wastage. Raspberry producers are said to face several issues including labour shortages and declining net margins. Picking raspberries alone accounts for over 50 per cent of total production costs.

Fieldwork developed its first autonomous raspberry harvesting robot in collaboration with Bosch. Named Alpha, the robot, analyses the crop, decides when to harvest the raspberries, and places them in punnets for delivery to supermarkets.

Working in collaboration with the Summer Berry Company, Fieldwork has deployed Alpha to farms in Portugal, and the fruit it harvests is currently being sold in UK supermarkets.

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Prior to this round, Fieldwork received over £700,000 in backing from Innovate UK and support from EIT Food.

Fieldwork will use the proceeds of this round to expand its team, outsource the manufacture of its robots and onboard more farmers to its harvesting-as-a-service offering. The company aims to have over 100 robots available for harvesting-as-a-service by 2025 and treble the harvesting speed of its robots.

The immediate focus of Fieldwork is to address the pressing issue of unharvested soft fruit, focusing on raspberries, which represent a $2bn global market opportunity.

In a statement, Jon Pollock, CEO of Elbow Beach Capital said: “The Fieldwork Robotics team combine their significant technical expertise with a drive to create an instant and lasting impact. Agriculture as it stands is not fit for purpose and we need innovative technologies to alleviate the unsustainable levels of waste and improve the economics for the farmer and end customers in the sector.”

This is Elbow Beach Capital’s third investment in the AgriTech space, having already invested in broccoli protein specialists, UPP and asparagus robot specialists, Muddy Machines.

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