- Carbon Robotics has raised a $70 million Series D round that will fuel the growth of its autonomous LaserWeeder platform for farmers.
- This round brings the US-based company’s total funding to date to $157 million.
- VC firm BOND led the round with participation from existing investors NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture arm), Anthos Capital, Fuse Venture Capital, Ignition Partners, Revolution, Sozo Ventures, and Voyager Capital.
- Carbon Robotics will use the new funding to expand sales of LaserWeeder and services into new international geographies; capital will also go towards new product development.
‘We’re focused very intently on the field’
“There’s a lot happening in agriculture and agtech right now and I think what folks maybe don’t realize is that some of the most advanced technology in the world in terms of AI, robotics, deep learning is being deployed right now in farms to help agriculture and agtech,” Carbon Robotics CEO Paul Mikesell told AgFunderNews this week at the FIRA Robotics show in California.
Carbon Robotics’ LaserWeeder platform uses deep-learning-based computer vision models to autonomously identify and eliminate weeds with CO2 lasers, processing 4.7 million high-resolution images per hour and zapping 5,000 weeds per minute.
Multiple panelists at FIRA this week highlighted weed management on the farm as one of the top areas for deploying automation technologies.
Mikesell specifically called out the farmers that have offered Carbon Robotics “advice, support and field testing opportunities back in the early days.”
“That kind of honest, bi-directional communication with our customers, particularly farmers, is a huge reason why we’re able to secure these kinds of funding rounds and frankly just pull so far ahead of everybody else,” he noted. “We’re focused very intently on the field and making sure the farmers are very happy.”
A bright spot in the capital crunch
The Series D fundraise is a bright spot in the ongoing capital crunch in agtech. Funding to the AgFunder-defined Farm Robotics, Mechanization and Equipment category declined 21.1% in H1 2024 versus H1 2023, partly thanks to an overall drop in agrifoodtech funding over the same time period. [Disclosure: AgFunderNews’ parent company is AgFunder.]
Mikesell suggested the crux of the issue for ag robotics is that it’s still a relatively new industry that hasn’t yet reached “quality and consistency to the degree that things can run in the farm.
“Part of the thing I see going on is that people produce machines that are not really field ready and then try to go out and sell them too early, or before they’ve tested them enough, or maybe they’ve tested them in a way that wasn’t really production quality,” he claimed.
The result: “They wind up with a machine that doesn’t really do the job that they need it to do.”
“I think people need to recognize that quality control, building for production in the field and raising venture capital and enough money so you can sustain yourself to get there is all part of the deal.”
New geographies, products on the near horizon
Carbon Robotics’ Series D funding comes several months after the company topped off its Series C with an undisclosed investment from NVentures, the venture arm of tech giant NVIDIA.
“They spent a lot of time and effort with us, trying to understand what we were doing,” Mikesell said of NVIDIA, adding that he was impressed by NVentures “ability to understand what was special about our machines.
“They came out into the field with us, saw the robots, talked to some farmers, and honestly, there’s not a lot of investors that would even have the capacity to do that due diligence. and much less somebody with NVIDIA’s stature in the market.”
BOND, too, went into the field with the machines, he added. “Sometimes [field locations] are not easy to get to, especially from the investment financial centers, so I’m always really impressed with VCs who will go out into the field and actually see these robots.”
Series D funding will go to a few different areas, including expanding availability of the LaserWeeder into new geographies.
Currently, Carbon Robotics has machines in the US and Canada, the UK, several countries in Europe, and Australia.
Mikesell did not indicate which new regions the company will expand to but noted that Carbon Robotics will “move into some new regions globally.”
New product development is also underway. While details remain under wraps, these products will be AI and robotics for agriculture but different from LaserWeeder, according to Mikesell.
