Autonomous mobility company Burro recently announced it closed a $24 million Series B co-led by Catalyst Investors and Translink Capital and existing investors S2G Ventures, Toyota Ventures, F-Prime Capital, and Cibus Capital. As part of the round, Brian Rich, managing partner with Catalyst Investors, and Kaz Kikuchi from Translink Capital will join the company’s Board.
Burro is an autonomous company that is building the future of work outdoors. Launched in 2017, the company began with a mobility platform to help customers meet rising wages and a shrinking workforce. Burro now has over 300 robots working as harvest assist robots in nurseries and permanent crops, where they tow trailers autonomously, patrol depot yards, and serve as a platform and physical API for a growing set of technology partners.
Burro is also the first collaborative robotic platform to work safely and reliably outdoors alongside human workers. And this enables customers to increase workforce efficiency within one year of investment. With more than 75,000 autonomous miles in paid commercial use and over 300,000 hours in operation, Burro’s reliability and scalability have been continuously enhanced, positioning the company for expansion into new markets and regions.
This year, Burro will expand its commercial, product, and engineering teams, bring on more dealers, and launch new products directly responding to customer demand, starting with its new product offering: Burro Grande. And Burro Grande expands beyond people scale (less than 500 lb. payload, light-duty towing) to a true pallet scale vehicle (1,500 lb. payload, 5,000 lb. towing), and features Burro Operation System Software V 5.0, which includes indoor/outdoor Lidar based localization for autonomous movement across indoor and outdoor operations.
Burro is also rapidly growing in the US within berry and grape farming and nurseries, with additional systems working at scale in Australia and New Zealand. And the company is on track to tackle the $1.2 trillion US outdoor labor market, where automation can address some of the industry’s most pressing challenges.
KEY QUOTES:
“Robots have long been stuck in warehouses and factories, and few robotics companies have successfully scaled outdoors into industries like agriculture, nurseries, and construction, where trillions of dollars are spent annually on labor. We have built a world-class product based upon state-of-the-art autonomous AI technology, and with this funding, we will deliver solutions for real-world problems, distributed world-wide through our network of dealers. With the incredible teams at Catalyst Investors and Translink Capital, and their strong track records of growing businesses, we are well on our way.”
— Charlie Andersen, CEO of Burro
“What sets Burro apart among the robotics sector is the team’s brilliant vision for augmenting – not replacing – labor with machines that work safely and reliably outdoors alongside humans, exponentially increasing efficiency and production. The Burro approach is already proven and its ROI demonstrated for farms and nurseries, perfectly positioning them to become the dominant outdoor robotics company for various industries and uses.”
— Brian Rich, managing partner at Catalyst Investors
“At Translink, we really like companies in the autonomy and robotics sector. We are especially excited about how Burro has brought automation to the agriculture sector. With their unique approach, Burros can work year-round, combatting the innate seasonality of work outdoors, by operating in a variety of crops and performing multiple tasks with one platform. Burro is positioned to be the first robotic company to successfully scale in agriculture and other outdoor environments.”
— Kaz Kikuchi, partner at Translink Capital
