Blue Earth Summit

There’s a moment in every great climate tech story where a founder sees a problem so painfully obvious that they can’t ignore it. For Robyn Sands, that moment came in the asparagus fields of Norfolk.

A humanities graduate turned robotics entrepreneur, Robyn doesn’t fit the usual stereotype of a deep-tech founder, and that’s exactly her superpower. Growing up in rural Norfolk, she saw first-hand the gruelling reality of farm labour. Later, while working in a robotics arm company, she noticed a pattern: countless industries were automating repetitive tasks, yet farming, one of the harshest labour markets in the world, was still struggling to move.

And then came the labour shortages. Year after year, farmers watched millions of pounds of crops rot in the ground because there simply weren’t enough workers to pick them.

Robyn asked the question no one else dared: “Why can’t a robot do this?”

That single question sparked the journey that would become AutoPickr, now one of the most exciting robotics companies in British agtech, and the newest member of Blue Earth Ventures.

• 👉 Listen to the full podcast on Spotify
• 👉 Watch the full podcast on YouTube

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Solving one of agriculture’s biggest pain points

Autopickr’s mission is astonishingly ambitious and brilliantly simple: Build fully autonomous robot farmhands that can pick crops when humans can’t.

Unlike many robotics companies building solutions in search of a problem, Autopickr began with the pain point itself: crops left unpicked, rising labour costs, unpredictable seasonal workforces, and growers desperate for a reliable alternative.

With just a single prototype, the team has:

• Completed paid trials across multiple farms.
• Collected high-quality grower data.
• Proved their system across different terrains, ridge heights, and crop types.
• Adapted their robotics to new markets like vineyards and daffodils by swapping the end-effector and computer vision system.
• Secured several Letters of Intent from growers,
• Demonstrated traction in some of the country’s most demanding agricultural environments.

The tech works, and growers want it.

Why this matters: Agriculture is at a breaking point

Globally, £6–8 billion worth of crops are left to rot every year because they cannot be harvested in time.

Farm labour shortages are now so acute that entire harvest seasons are at risk. In some markets, farmers are turning down expansion opportunities simply because they can’t secure labour.

Automation isn’t a “nice-to-have” anymore. It’s a lifeline.

Autopickr’s robots don’t get tired. They don’t require visas. They don’t disappear mid-season. And unlike traditional machinery, they are designed to mimic the flexibility and dexterity of a human picker, enabling them to operate in environments where traditional farm machinery cannot.

The opportunity is enormous. As Robyn puts it: “We could be as big as John Deere. The market is that big, and the need is that urgent.”

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A business model that scales fast

Autopickr plans to roll out using a Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) model. It’s a win-win:

• Growers avoid upfront capital expenditure
• Autopickr keeps each robot working year-round across multiple crops
• Revenue per robot dramatically increases
• Farmers get a risk-free introduction to the technology
• Autopickr avoids wasting idle assets between harvest seasons

With this model, the company projects up to 6x ROI per robot per year.

But they’re also flexible: some growers want to own the tech outright. Direct sales will become possible once they scale manufacturing.

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Funding the next stage: Now raising through Blue Earth Ventures

To date, Autopickr has raised:

• £710k in private equity
• £1m+ in Innovate UK grants
• Investment from SFC, angel groups, and a family office

Now, they are raising a round via Blue Earth Ventures to:

• Build five additional robots
• Accelerate vineyard automation
• Expand field deployment in April
• Convert LOIs into commercial contracts
• Speed up productisation and prepare for scale

This raise sets the stage for a £2 million round next year, aligned with VCs, for:

• Large-scale commercial rollout
• Hiring in operations, sales, and international deployment
• Infrastructure and maintenance teams
• Expansion into high-demand markets (including California)

Robyn is very clear: The biggest risk isn’t the technology, it’s funding. This is now a race to scale.

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Autopickr’s North Star

Autopickr isn’t just building robots. They’re reshaping the future of global food systems:

• Preventing billions in crop losses
• Supporting supply chains under strain
• Removing dangerous, low-paid jobs
• Upskilling agricultural workforces
• Bringing resilience to one of the world’s most essential industries

Their ambition? To become a global agricultural robotics company on the scale of John Deere, but built for the next century.

And they’re already well on their way.

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Join Autopickr on their journey

We’re proud to welcome Autopickr into the Blue Earth Ventures ecosystem, joining a growing portfolio of founders solving the world’s most urgent challenges through innovation.

Autopickr is now raising through the Blue Earth platform, and investor interest is already building.

If you’d like to speak with the team or request the full investor deck, reach out directly, or connect with Blue Earth Ventures to get involved in the round via [email protected].

This is one of the most compelling early-stage robotics stories in the UK. And they are just getting started.