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Traptic builds giant farming robots to save the world’s food production system from a critical labor shortage.
United States, North America Disrupt SF 2019
2017
Acquired
Jillian Flavin Founder
No South by Southwest for me this year. No drinking weird promotional energy drinks while watching bands play front yards at 9 AM or traveling out of my way to see the Daniel Johnston mural on the side of the delightfully named but permanently closed Thai, How Are You? restaurant. For a change of pace, […]
We’ve been charting Traptic’s progress ever since the South Bay-based startup appeared on the Disrupt Battlefield stage back in 2019. The company carved out a potentially meaningful agtech niche in California’s vast strawberry fields — farmland that accounts for around 88% of the fruit’s U.S. yield. Fieldhand shortages are a problem that dates back well […]
We’re fresh off of our big Pittsburgh event, and I’ll have more thoughts on that for you next week, once we’ve crawled through all of the interviews, published profiles and all of that fun stuff. t I admit that I’m also partly putting that off because there’s just a ton of investment news to get […]
We first covered Traptic back in 2019, when it appeared as a Battlefield finalist on stage at Disrupt SF. Today, the South Bay robotics startup is announcing some major progress. For starters, it began commercial deployment of its strawberry-picking mobile robot early this month. Traptic tells TechCrunch that Blazer-Wilkinson, a top-five U.S. strawberry producer, began […]
Farming is one of the oldest professions, but today those amber waves of grain (and soy) are a test bed for sophisticated robotic solutions to problems farmers have had for millennia. Learn about the cutting edge (sometimes literally) of agricultural robots at TC Sessions: Robotics+AI on March 3 with the founders of Traptic, Pyka and […]
Over the past two days, 20 startups have taken the stage at Disrupt SF, laying out their visions, demonstrating their technology and answering questions from our expert judges. The startups came from all across the world, and they’re tackling industries ranging from cholera detection to orbital refueling. Now we’ve taken the judges’ feedback and chosen […]
At some unspecified time, somewhere down the road, Traptic would love to expand its robots to pick a wide variety of crops. For now, however, the South Bay-based team is focused solely on strawberries. With roughly 88 percent of the fruit’s total U.S. yield occurring in California, the berries represent ample opportunity for disruption. A […]
TechCrunch is excited to announce the 20 startups competing in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019. Over the next three days, these elite companies will compete on tech’s biggest stage for the Disrupt Cup, the attention of global press and investors and $100,000 in equity-free prize money. The selection process for Startup Battlefield […]