Agritech startup Muddy Machines, a StartLife alumn, today announced a new round of series seed funding of 1.8M euro. The new funding will allow the company to enhance the development of its harvesting robots that support zero emissions and solve labor issues in the agriculture industry.

The funding round was led by Regenerate Ventures with participation from Ponderosa Ventures, Jude Gomilla and Thrive/SVG Ventures and numerous others. “We were impressed by Muddy Machine’s vision and speed of technical development.”, says Paul Rous, MD at Regenerate Ventures. “Fixing labor issues in farming is essential for ensuring a sustainable domestic food supply in developed countries and reducing food miles.”, added Evi Steyer, MD at Ponderosa Ventures.

Florian Richter, CEO and co-founder at Muddy Machines, stipulates that raising money for agtech and hardware businesses is a challenge at the best of times. “We are extremely proud to have secured this fund raise in the current investment climate. We will now focus on creating a meaningful amount of harvest capacity for our customers.”

The situation is desperate.“, said John Chinn of Cobrey Farms, the largest growers of asparagus in the United Kingdom.

Road ahead

This new funding will be used to strengthen the company’s engineering team and build  sufficient runway while demonstrating product market fit. Specifically, the areas that the company will focus on are:

  1. Building a small herd of its Sprout robots for the 2023 asparagus harvest season and generating initial revenues,
  2. Continuing with the development of new crop harvest capabilities and
  3. Developing a roadmap for scaling production of Sprout robots.

About Muddy Machines

Muddy Machines was founded in 2020 by Christopher Chavasse and Florian Richter with a vision to sustainably solve labor issues in farming with robots. They developed a robotic platform that is capable of deploying a variety of harvest tools in specialty field corps. In Fall 2021, they took part in StartLife Accelerate. The company has won nearly €3M in grant funding.