Tim Bucher, co-founder, and CEO of Agtonomy, grew up on a farm and was already running his own farm when he attended a computer course at UC Davis and became fascinated. Agtonomy, a hybrid autonomy and tele-assist service firm that turns tractors and other agricultural equipment into autonomous machines to provide a low-cost, technology-enabled workforce for local farms to handle such equipment, was founded because of his concurrent agriculture/technology career. Last September, it emerged from stealth mode with $4 million in seed funding from a consortium of investors including Grit Ventures, GV, and Village Global.
Grit and GV returned to invest in the South San Francisco-based startup as part of a $5 million seed round that also included Toyota Ventures, Flybridge, Hampton VC, E2JDJ, and Momenta Ventures. The latest funding brings Agtonomy’s total funding to $9 million. Bucher was not planning to raise funds again so soon after his previous round, but he saw the prediction for 2022, which predicted that agtech will be the No. 1 “hot area” for the year and beyond, he decided to take the additional investment.
“It was difficult to attract any VC attention linked to agtech five years ago,” he said, “but there has just been overwhelming interest from investors, and though we are just getting started, local agriculture needs help today.” “The money will speed up our trials and bring on new partners, thus turbo-charging our activities and allowing us to double down on our current pace, which includes growing the staff.” In the next months, Bucher expects to have 50 trials running and to treble the company’s 20-person headcount.
He claims that Agtonomy is as simple as dialing an Uber driver. A farmer can give a task to one of the tractors, such as mowing the field, using a mobile phone app. He believes that self-driving technology like this, as well as what other firms like John Deere are doing, would help farmers throughout the world overcome decades of labor shortages. At Bucher’s Trattore Farms, the company has a small fleet of “proof of concept” electric cars that have been running for a year. He claims that these vehicles handle practically all of the farm work on his property.
Bucher anticipates a commercial launch in 2023, with the firm beginning with a few hundred tractors. In comparison, he said, some 300,000 tractors sold each year. Tractors range in price from $500,000 to $1 million, with businesses such as John Deere targeting large farms. Agronomy’s autonomous cars, on the other hand, will cost roughly $50,000, according to Bucher, which will inspire larger farms to buy a swarm of smaller robots that can work 24 hours a day, are more environmentally friendly, and do not tear up the ground.
“We see great promise in agtech and are making investments appropriately,” Jim Adler, the founding managing director of Toyota Ventures, said in a written statement. On fields, where they are badly required, fully autonomous cars will become a reality.” Similarly, Bucher argues that many of today’s autonomous vehicles serve as “convenience technologies,” while agtech businesses are developing similar vehicles in what he refers to as “necessity technology.”
