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This January, John McElhone moved to Santa Monica from, as he described it, “a tiny farm in the absolute middle of nowhere” in his native Northern Ireland, with the goal of growing the crop-monitoring tech startup he founded.
It looks like McElhone’s big move is beginning to pay off: His company, CropSafe, announced a $3 million seed funding round on Tuesday that will help it develop and scale its remote crop-monitoring capabilities for farmers. Venture firm Elefund led the round and was joined by investors Foundation Capital, Global Founders Capital, V1.VC and Great Oaks Capital, as well as angel investors Cory Levy, Josh Browder and Charlie Songhurst. The capital will go toward growing CropSafe’s six-person engineering team and building up its new U.S. headquarters in Santa Monica.
The nascent agtech company began in 2019 as a project between McElhone and his co-founder and high school classmate, Micheál McLaughlin. Growing up in the Northern Irish countryside, the pair developed an interest in technology, which led to ideas about how such technology could aid the agricultural communities they were raised around.
“We noticed that there was a lot of really new, cool technology coming into the farming market at the time,” McElhone told dot.LA. “But every single farmer in our area hadn't a clue how to get started with all this new fancy technology, because they would have to go to training sessions or learn how satellite imagery from NASA works. And farmers—their job is to farm, not to interpret data.”
The first version of CropSafe’s software aimed to bridge that gap. At its core, the platform is an interpretation engine that scrapes and parses through troves of weather data and satellite imagery to find the information that farmers need to grow and harvest more effectively. “CropSafe did that work for you and spots useful nuggets like, ‘Hey, there's blight in field no. 14; here's the exact location and what you need to do next,’” McElhone explained.
But the project, which began simply as a tool for friends and family in Northern Ireland, started drawing attention from users around the world; to the founders’ surprise, people began offering to pay for the service. “That was kind of a turning point—realizing it wasn't just our 200 people that wanted to use it,” McElhone said. So he packed his bags and moved to Southern California at the start of this year to try to build out the software in one of agtech’s hottest markets.
McElhone and McLaughlin now believe there’s a better way forward that would position CropSafe as more akin to a fintech platform for farmers: Because the software collects so much data on farms, it can offer insights into removing bottlenecks that farmers could leverage to secure crucial financing for equipment and other needs.
“If a farm is leasing three combines this year, with the data we have on that farm [and its] crops, we might be able to say: ‘Hey, if you lease an additional combine this year, we know that you will produce so-and-so additional yield and produce $25,000,’” according to McElhone. In an ideal scenario, CropSafe could allow the financing for that combine to be approved instantly on the strength of the data on its platform; the farmer clicks a button on the app, and the combine gets delivered the next day.
So far, McElhone is tight-lipped about partnerships in this area of its business, but said announcements should be coming this summer. The company is also considering offering farmers insights into the best times and places to sell crops, with CropSafe taking a small cut of revenues for the service. (The idea is that farmers would only pay when they see increased sales from using CropSafe’s insights, McElhone said.)
But the move to Santa Monica has already proven fertile for the company, which is planning to announce partnerships with other agtech companies that would allow CropSafe to act more as an operating system—one connecting autonomous tractors, weathers sensors, and other “internet of things” technologies to ensure better, more sustainable crops. With local startups like Future Acres and Abundant Robotics already operating in the space, CropSafe seems poised to benefit from Southern California’s position as a hub for agtech in the U.S.
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The next time you’re having late night cravings and find yourself at a Jack in the Box, there’s a chance you’re munching on burgers and fries made by robots.
The San Diego-based fast food chain is partnering with Miso Robotics, the food tech startup responsible for the burger-flipping robot known as Flippy. After recently teaming up with Panera Bread to install its CookRight Coffee system and with Chipotle on an automated tortilla chip-maker, the Pasadena-based company announced Tuesday it would be sending an upgraded version of its signature burger-flipping droid, the aptly named Flippy 2, to a Jack in the Box location in San Diego in the next several weeks.
Flippy first entered the market in 2017. Miso initially charged burger chain White Castle $60,000 to install the first machines at its locations—an arm and a leg for a bulky robot equipped with a robotic arm that could slap patties onto a grill.
Five years later, the startup's efforts to scale the technology have brought down its cost down to $3,000 per month. Today’s Flippy 2 features a much sleeker design that takes up considerably less kitchen space. No longer content as a mere burger flipper, the upgraded Flippy has been designed to maneuver Jack in the Box’s proprietary fry baskets to cook everything from taco shells to fish filets to curly fries—freeing up employees to handle customers or prep other items.
Flippy 2 cooking Jack in the Box curly fries. Courtesy of Miso Robotics
There are dozens of Flippy robotic arms currently making burgers, with the early adopters including CaliBurger and Dodgers Stadium. Earlier this year, White Castle announced it would install Flippy 2 robots at 100 locations across the country.
But unlike White Castle, Jack in the Box serves a wide variety of menu items, from tacos to chicken tenders, that require more than just a spatula to finish the job—presenting Miso with a “a new challenge,” Jake Brewer, the startup's chief strategy officer, told dot.LA.
“A taco shell…that’s more delicate than a chicken nugget or french fry. So we were able to adapt Flippy to be able to accept those items,” Brewer said.
Once a food item is placed before Flippy, the robot's AI-enabled camera will identify the food, pick it up, cook it in the correct fry basket and safely place it into a holding area. Brewer said the company was already developing add-ons allowing the attachment of specialty baskets to the robot, but when the request came in from Jack in the Box, the process was accelerated.
Sippy, Miso's automatic drink dispenser and sealer that will roll out at the end of the year.Courtesy of Miso Robotics
Miso is currently putting the finishing touches on Sippy, an automatic beverage dispenser and sealer that will be joining Flippy 2 at the Jack in the Box in San Diego by the end of this year. The startup is currently in the process of raising a Series E funding round, having set an initial target of $40 million.
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How do we save restaurants?
As the food industry continues to battle supply chain bottlenecks, labor issues, razor-thin margins and the rise of delivery apps, the answer may lie in real estate. Even before the pandemic, in a 2019 report, the National Restaurant Association noted that the coming years would see a gradual trend away from in-person dining as delivery becomes more popular.
“Convenience will be a huge priority and consumers will appreciate all the options offered by restaurants…but they won’t always be eating at the restaurant,” the report said. “Dining away from the restaurant will grow in importance.”
The pandemic has only accelerated this trend, which has seen the industry morph via new models like ghost kitchens that eliminate the need for servers, cashiers and seating space with delivery-only options. (The most notable company in this space is CloudKitchens, an L.A.-based ghost kitchen startup launched by former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.) Ghost kitchens phase-out overhead expenses like kitchen certifications and licensing fees; as a “restaurant” owner, you don’t need a lengthy lease to operate—just pay for the space you use as needed.
Earlier this week, Chipotle announced a $50 million venture fund that will invest in early-stage food tech startups that, according to Chipotle chief technology officer Curt Garner, will "enhance our employee and guest experience, and quite possibly revolutionize the restaurant industry.”
The Newport Beach-based Mexican fast-food chain is already incubating at least one of these technologies at its innovation center in Irvine: an AI-enabled robot called “Chippy,” developed in conjunction with Pasadena-based Miso Robotics, which promises to replicate the “subtle variations in flavor” of Chipotle’s tortilla chips so as to not “lose the humanity behind our culinary experience."
But robots like “Chippy” also cut down on the square footage usually occupied by kitchen workers and their food preparation stations. Piestro, another local food tech enterprise, condenses an entire pizza kitchen into a compact vending machine. Piestro is backed by Wavemaker Labs, a Santa Monica food tech incubator that funded "Chippy," as well as the autonomous bubble tea maker Bobacino.
This kind of technology offers restaurant operators the chance to cut costs at a time when they can use all the help they can get. It also threatens to automate a lot of human labor—which, of course, means eliminating jobs. And so you’ve got to ask yourself: Without cooks, servers and dining rooms, what remains of the restaurant industry to save? — Keerthi Vedantam
Jeffery Katzenberg’s WndrCo Raising New $450 Million Venture Fund
VC firm WndrCo, founded by former DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, is looking to raise $450 million for its second fund, according to regulatory filings.
Snap Feels the Pain of a Disrupted Digital Ad Market
The Santa Monica-based company, which generates virtually all of its revenue from ads, reported first-quarter sales on Thursday that narrowly missed Wall Street’s expectations, despite adding more users than analysts predicted.
Sheryl Sandberg Reportedly Buried Stories About Bobby Kotick
Meta Platforms Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg reportedly quashed two articles about her controversial ex-boyfriend, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick.
Afterparty Raises $4 Million to Launch NFT Ticketing Platform
Web3 startup Afterparty is set to launch an NFT-based ticketing platform for live events, with plans to use its Utopian NFTs as event tickets after a trial run at a Las Vegas music festival last month.
🎧 Listen Up: Heela Yang on Bodycare Brand Sol de Janerio
On this episode of the Behind Her Empire podcast, Heela Yang, the co-founder and CEO of Sol de Janeiro, talks about how uprooting her life to move to another country helped inspire her award-winning body care line.
What We're Reading Elsewhere...
- The Boring Company announces $675 million raise, and a slew of new hiring.
- Venice-based Sameday Technologies agrees to pay $20 million to L.A. to settle claims it faked COVID test results.
- L.A.-based SaveLive acquires concert promoter Jam Productions, owner of marquee theaters in Chicago and Minneapolis.
- A look at how Cal State Long Beach is preparing students for the boom in local aerospace jobs.
- Bird launches a bike share program in Madrid, Spain.
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