Robots could soon take on the tasks of farmworkers harvesting the nation's food.
Santa Monica-based Future Acres, an agriculture tech startup, unveiled its first prototype on Tuesday — a robot named Carry that helps farmers transport crops.
Carry won't replace human employees that pick crops. Rather, the remote-operated machine will follow workers and take what they collect back to a sorting facility, speeding up operations in a labor-intensive industry. Since 2017, the team has been quietly busy testing the AI-powered machine that can transport up to 500 pounds of produce in virtually any weather condition.
Titan School Solutions, an Irvine, Calif.-based company that provides cloud-based software to manage school nutrition at more than 700 districts nationwide, has been acquired by LINQ for $75 million.
TITAN was founded in 2015 to bring efficiency to the school lunch line by IT professional Brad Blankenship. Today it's used by more than 4 million students across the U.S. and the company has grown from about 10 to more than 80 employees over the last three years.
On this week's episode of L.A. Venture, hear lots of insights on equity crowdfunding from Buck Jordan. He's raising $50-$100K a day, mostly on SeedInvest, for the robotics and food companies coming out of WaveMaker Labs.
Jordan also addresses the dramatic changes coming to the food industry, and why WaveMaker is so focused on the application of robotics to this industry in particular.
"The best investments I think come from the really hard problems," he says. "There's not a bigger problem right now or an industry that's more under siege than the food industry is."
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