Maybe I am wrong in the reading so I want to make sure I understand; what is the ratio of harvesters to humans; and how quickly do they work compared to a human?

Hi Philip! We are targeting for commercial scale to have teams of 5 harvesting machines per human operator. Each Harvester would do the work equivalent of 2-3 human workers per day, therefore for a standard '30 person' team, we would have between 2-3 teams. Note: Though we aspire to be as fast, or faster than a human being, the real goal is to be equal or better per total harvest day. Current harvesters are limited by law in California to 8 hours per day before they trigger overtime laws (ass...

Hello, how are you identifying the ripe strawberries and picking them without damaging the fruit? There automated grape harvesting machines out there but the challenge is to identify the fruit that is ripe and pick it properly without damage. Very expensive vision systems.

Thanks for your question, Glenn. The short version is we teach our software to recognize 'ripe berries' the same way you would teach your kid: We give them examples. In the course of our field testing we have seen thousands of strawberries at the full range of ripeness levels. We take a subset of these berries and label them with their ripeness levels and train neural networks to classify their ripeness. Therefore, we only need 'standard' cameras, making the cost for the vision system is actu...

What is the pricing and maintenance for farms? How much would it cost for a person to perform the same tasks? What has been the feedback from farmers or the people you collaborate with in farms that are your clients?

Hi Victor! Thank you for your question! Our plan is at scale to offer the service at the same price as normal, domestic workers, but much less than the 20-25% premium they pay for Legal Immigrant Labor. We are a 'drop in solution', so instead of hiring a team of 30 workers + a supervisor and assistant, they hire 10 of our harvesters + 2 'robot supervisors' who oversee the robots. Everything else remains the same from their point of view. In this scenario, we are expecting greater than 70% mar...

Hi team, impressive technology and I also love your energy during the investor Webinar, your passion is easily seen! I have a few questions regarding the investment: 1) How does the result of this fundraise affect your future growth? I'm actually surprised that the raise has n...

Thanks Tuan! To directly answer your questions: 1) If we raise an additional $250k beyond what we already have raised on WeFunder/off platform/beyond additional commitments (Connie), we believe that we will have enough funds to close the gap before grant funding can take over and allow us to be cash flow positive by the end of the year. The grants we have won so far are Small Business Innovative Research Grants (SBIR): https://www.sbir.gov/. These are designed to help small, innovative compan...

Hi Alex, Thank you for answering my previous questions in such a detailed way and timely manner. I really like that you have a great vision and knowledge, a working prototype and good business plan to make it happen. I am based in Australia and I can see that this type of robo...

Hi Tuan, Really appreciate your support and encouragement :). For your surprise, we have only really gotten started on WeFunder... they only announced us on their newsletter this month. I believe you are right that we will get a ton more interest as people's awareness increases. Already, for this month, we have nearly doubled the investment I had originally gotten from friend outreach. I have been working to circulate our campaign in different ways, but not sure yet how best to ensure tractio...

L5 Automation

Robots Picking Strawberries. Seriously. Hand-eye Coordination Software to transform the world.

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La Cañada Flintridge, CA

Technology B2B Minority Founder AI Agriculture & Agtech

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Invested $150,000 this round

We invested in L5 Automation because they have a better way of automating strawberry harvest. Strawberries are a nutritious crop that can be profitably cultivated, but they're very difficult to pick. Today, strawberry harvesting is entirely manual, and as labor availability decreases and costs increase, it's becoming prohibitively expensive to cultivate strawberries and other soft fruits. L5 is taking a unique approach towards strawberry harvesting with its 2-armed harvester.

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