Philadelphia-based Burro, which has built robots for use in agriculture, has closed a $24 million Series B co-led by New York City-based growth equity firm Catalyst Investors and Palo Alto, Calif.-based Translink Capital. Existing investors Toyota Ventures, S2G Ventures, which has an office in Boston, and London’s Cibus Capital and F-Prime Capital, which has an office in Cambridge, Mass., also participated.
Burro — which was previously known as Augean Robotics — handed board seats to Catalyst’s managing partner Brian Rich and Translink partner Kaz Kikuchi. Founded in 2017 by Charles Andersen, Deniz Ilhan, Terry Scott and Vibhor Sood, Burro has so far raised $36.7 million in a novel bid to build robots that can be used outdoors.
Outdoor Robots, Anybody!
“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,” said Andersen, a Harvard Business School graduate who leads Burro.
Andersen, who grew up on a working farm “tinkering with machines and technology,” says Burro has developed a world-class product based on state-of-the-art autonomous AI technology. With this funding, “we will deliver solutions for real-world problems, distributed world-wide through our network of dealers,” he said.
Burro has built an eponymous vision-based fully autonomous robotic platform. Today, over 300 are in use, assisting in harvesting at nurseries, farms and agriculture fields. The machines can autonomously tow trailers and patrol depot yards, and work together with other digital and physical devices via apps. Besides the United States, Burro’s robots have been deployed in Australia, New Zealand Japan and some South America countries.
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It’s All About Efficiencies
“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,” said Catalyst’s Rich, who says his firm spent two years looking for the right autonomous robotic tech startup before finding Burro.
Anderson told Technical.ly the new funding would be used to expand the 44-person startup’s engineering and product teams, as well as its sales force. Burro last year hired a former Toyota engineer, Guillermo Pita Gil, to head engineering. A 15-year industry veteran, Pita Gil previously worked at Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi. He holds a Ph.D in controls theory from Centrale Supelec in France.
Burro is also launching a new product, Burro Grande. The new product triples carrying capacity to 1,500 pounds. While Burro could tow 2,000 pounds, Burro Grande can move 5,000 pounds. Burro Grande runs on a more advanced version of software that uses Lidar to track autonomous movement.
