by Taylor Soper on October 21, 2024 at 4:30 am
The robots also take care of repetitive and dangerous work, according to Mikesell, allowing farmers to move their employees to other tasks.
“There are a lot of jobs,” he said, noting the farming labor shortage. “We’re just getting rid of the worst ones to be doing.”
Mikesell is a longtime technologist and entrepreneur who previously co-founded data storage company Isilon Systems (which sold for $2.25 billion in 2010) and led an infrastructure engineering group at Uber for four years.
“The real promise of AI is not going to be just large language models and ChatGPT,” he said. “It’s going to be, what does it actually do for your life?”
Carbon Robotics stands out in an agriculture-tech industry that has seen venture capital funding decline by 60% since 2021, according to a report from McKinsey. Agtech startups have struggled to scale as they face adoption challenges with farmers, McKinsey said in a separate report.
“While many companies are exploring speculative tech solutions in this space, Carbon Robotics has proven it can not only execute but also scale innovations that directly address farmers’ needs,” said Mood Rowghani, general partner at BOND who is joining the company’s board. BOND, founded in 2018 as a spinout of Kleiner Perkins, has backed Clear, Relativity Space, Ironcald, Canva, and others.
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