Charlie Grinnell, founder and CEO of HarvestAI is excited by the prospect of bringing a different approach to the material handling robotics space.

"Our expertise is in applying practical robotics to improve worker productivity with a focus on harsh, manual labor tasks," he said. "Traditional material handling robots have been associated with fixed-function factory automation, which generally operate in indoor, tightly controlled work spaces. We have a very different solution that uses teams of small, agile, mobile robots (AMR's) designed to work flexibly with human workers in a broad range of uncontrolled environments making them suitable for many market applications."

Life Sciences Partners (LSP), the Midpoint Food & Ag Fund, and Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation provided the funding.

The HarvestAI engineering and executive team has links to other robotics and technology firms such as iRobot Corporation, DEKA R&D, Draper Labs, Vitesse Semiconductor and Bear River Associates.