The Escalquens-based startup Naïo Technologies, specialized in agricultural robots, today announces the closing of a €14 million funding round led by Bpifrance. Impact investor Pymwymic and its historical shareholders, Demeter and Capagro, flanked Bpifrance in this investment round.
The French company, founded in 2011 by robotic engineers Aymeric Barthes and Gaëtan Séverac, manufactures and markets agricultural solutions in close collaboration with farmers. Their weeding robots respect both the environment and man: they provide a solution to assist farmers in their daily work, reduce the strenuous physical workload and limit the use of chemical weedkillers.
Nearly 150 robots (called Oz, Dino and Ted) are already deployed at farms and vineyards both in Europe and in the United States. The promise of contributing to more sustainable agricultural practices, combined with the company’s ability to demonstrate market readiness over the past 18 months, have contributed to the successful closing of this funding round. Continuously innovating allows the company to handle different crops types. To do so, Naïo Technologies has developed a standard navigation system for agricultural robots. This navigation system can be implemented on any off-road robot which allows to address many crop types.
This new investment round will enable Naïo Technologies to further capitalize on its position as a leader in agricultural robotics and reach the next level of technology maturity in order to prepare the robots for mass production.
“In the next 10 years, there will be robots in every fields of Europe and North America. We recognize that the challenge is very ambitious, but we are convinced that we can meet it alongside our partners and stakeholders. Our goal is to ensure the ecological and social transition to sustainable agriculture” says Gaëtan Séverac, co-founder of Naïo Technologies.
“We are very proud to announce our investment in Naïo Technologies as pioneer in agricultural field robotics. Naïo enables farmers to transition their farms using the rise in precision farming and sustainable farming, and allows them to meet both customer demand and current and forthcoming regulatory constraints regarding the limitation of chemical inputs in the fields,” says Laura Panquet, Ecotechnologies Fund of Bpifrance.
