- Burro has closed a $24 million Series B funding round led by Catalyst Investors and Translink Capital.
- Existing investors in the round include S2G Ventures, Toyota Ventures, F-Prime Capital, and Cibus Capital.
- Burro specialises in autonomous ground vehicles designed for outdoor work, including carrying, towing, patrolling, and mowing.
US-based autonomous mobility company, Burro, has closed a $24 million Series B funding round led by growth equity firm Catalyst Investors and Translink Capital, with returning investors, S2G Ventures, Toyota Ventures, F-Prime Capital, and Cibus Capital. As part of the funding, Brian Rich, managing partner with Catalyst Investors, and Kaz Kikuchi from Translink Capital, will join the company’s Board.
Founded in 2017, Burro serves as “people/pallet scale autonomous ground vehicles for carrying, towing, patrolling, and mowing, and are designed to lay the base for the fully autonomous future of work outdoors”, helping workers ease demanding laborious outdoor works with collaborative robots.
Burro is the first collaborative robotic platform to work safely and reliably outdoors with human workers. The company has over 300 robots in paid commercial use in orchards and vineyards in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South America, assisting in harvest in nurseries and permanent crops. These robots autonomously tow trailers, patrol depot yards, and function as a base and physical API for technology partners.
In 2024, the company will expand its teams and dealers, and launch new products, with Burro Grande as its latest offering. 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 localisation for autonomous movement across indoor and outdoor operations.”
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“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 labour”, said Charlie Andersen, CEO of Burro. “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 worldwide 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.”
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“What sets Burro apart among the robotics sector is the team’s brilliant vision for augmenting – not replacing – labour with machines that work safely and reliably outdoors alongside humans, exponentially increasing efficiency and production,” said Brian Rich, managing partner at Catalyst Investors. “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.”
“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,” said Kaz Kikuchi, partner at Translink Capital. “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.”
