- Bear Flag Robotics recently announced it raised a $7.9 million seed extension funding round led by True Ventures. These are the details.
Bear Flag Robotics recently announced it raised a $7.9 million seed extension funding round led by True Ventures. Graphene Ventures, AgFunder, D20, and Green Cow VC also participated in the round. Including this round of funding, the company has raised $12.5 million total since Bear Flag co-founders Igino Cafiero and Aubrey Donnellan launched the company in 2017.
What does Bear Flag do? the agtech company is developing autonomous technology for farm tractors, which enables growers to increase productivity and improve safety on their farms.
As today’s growers are faced with the difficult proposition of increasing productivity with continuously rising costs and limited resources. The farm labor pool has been disappearing and increasing in cost, 10% year over year. And climate change is forcing growers to consolidate operations into shorter weather windows.
Safety has also been a pressing concern as tractor overturns and transportation incidents are the leading cause of death on U.S. farms. And Bear Flag Robotics is helping growers overcome these challenges rapidly and increase reliability and uptime on their farms.
Bear Flag Robotics’ mission is to increase global food production and reduce the cost of growing food through machine automation. And the company provides the technology, services and support to enable autonomous tractor operations, helping growers produce more food with less resources.
While the tractors are running autonomously, human supervisors use Bear Flag’s software to monitor and command their fleet from a remote mission control room or personal device. And the software plans optimal field patterns based on growers’ implements, and provides predictive and post-run analytics that enable growers to farm better each season.
Bear Flag Robotics is working with the largest produce and commodity growers in California and Arizona. And the company’s direct-to-growers sales model allows the company to partner with its customers. This ensures higher quality standards while continuously releasing software capabilities that drive the most impact on the ground. And by linking seasonal data, Bear Flag can improve efficiency and lower costs through the entire growing season.
KEY QUOTES:
“I absolutely love this team and their mission, but when their customers told us how much they loved their Bear Flag tractors, and how farmers from the region would see it in the field and come pay a visit, we knew that this was a special company. Bear Flag has the potential to be one of the most important companies in agriculture over the next decade.”
— AgFunder partner Rob Leclerc
“When we first invested in Igino and Aubrey, we saw an innovative, passionate team bringing automation to farms. The impact of what Bear Flag Robotics delivers is meaningful every single day for farm operations, growers and consumers.”
— Rohit Sharma, partner at True Ventures
