Burro closed a $24 million Series B co-led by New York City-based growth equity firm Catalyst Investors and Translink Capital, along with existing investors S2G Ventures, Toyota Ventures, F-Prime Capital, and the Cibus Capital LLP. As part of the round, Brian Rich, managing partner with Catalyst Investors, and Kaz Kikuchi, from Translink Capital, will join the company’s board.
Burro is an autonomy company, founded in 2017, that began with a mobility platform designed to help customers meet rising wages and a shrinking workforce. Today, Burro has more than 300 robots working as harvest assist robots in nurseries and permanent crops, where they tow trailers autonomously, patrol depot yards, and serve as a platform and physical API for a growing set of technology partners.
While robotics has been used indoors for years, Burro is the first collaborative robotic platform to work safely and reliably outdoors alongside human workers. This enables customers to increase workforce efficiency within one year of investment. With more than 75,000 autonomous miles in paid commercial use and more than 300,000 hours in operation, Burro’s reliability and scalability has been enhanced, positioning the company for expansion into new markets and regions.
“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 labor,” says 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 world-wide 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.”
This year, the Burro company says it will expand its commercial, product and engineering teams, bring on more dealers and launch new products in response to customer demand, beginning with its new product offering: Burro Grande. 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 localization for autonomous movement across indoor and outdoor operations.
Burro is growing in the U.S. within berry and grape farming and nurseries with additional systems working at scale in Australia and New Zealand. The company says it is on track to tackle the $1.2 trillion U.S. outdoor labor market, where automation can address some of the industry's challenges.
