The founders of Upside Robotics met in 2023 because they were both looking to build an impact-driven company that touched climate and agriculture. Less than a year later, they were sleeping in a camper on the side of a Canadian corn field building their robotics startup.
Waterloo, Ontario-based Upside Robotics builds lightweight solar-powered autonomous robots that deliver right-sized amounts of fertilizer and nutrients to crops when they need it. The company’s software runs on proprietary algorithms to decipher when and how much fertilizer the plants need using weather and soil data.
Upside’s robots currently work on corn plants — one of the most fertilizer-intensive crops — which was chosen by Upside for that exact reason, Jana Tian, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
After Tian and Sam Dugan, co-founder and chief technology officer, met at the Entrepreneur First accelerator, they decided to focus on reducing fertilizer waste using robots because it fit squarely into the center of the venn diagram of their interests. It also leaned well toward their backgrounds.
Dugan had been building robots since he was ten years old and Tian had years of experience as a chemical engineer in the food division at Unilever.
Customer discovery with farmers further confirmed this was an area farmers were willing to pay for a better way.
“Traditionally, the way the fertilizer has been applied, only 30% of the total fertilizer gets taken by the crop, so a majority of it gets wasted,” Tian said. “Farmers usually do one application per season, so they have to front load a lot of the fertilizer. But the crops need the fertilizer during the season as well. We knew there was that problem that a lot of our growers really wanted different solutions to.”
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