Earth Rover

Farmer robots that do not use chemicals or damage the soil.

Investment overview

Impact category

Agrifood Systems

Investment type

Loan

Yearly interest

Term

months

Risk level

B-

Earth Rover robots help vegetable and salad farmers control weeds using targetted concentrated light energy without chemicals or damaging the soil, supporting the trend towards organic no-till farming.

Earth Rover is raising 2 million euros to expand its R&D team and to commercialise its patent-pending LightWeeding robots. This innovative project is supported by ESA - the European Space Agency, as well as UKRI - the UK Research and Innovation organization. Both these institutions have assessed and provided grants for this project in excess of 750,000€. Investors including, the asset manager MERCIA, have invested around 500.000€ in the company.

The funds raised through GoParity will be used for:

Expanding the R&D team.
Implementing the Earth Rover pilot project on vegetable fields in Spain and the UK.

The technology seems promising and has attracted the attention of innovation institutions, grant providers, early investors, and of leading organic farmers Pollybell, the first adopters of the technology.

What is the impact?

Direct

Jobs creation: with the expansion of the R&D team and of the company’s operations, Earth Rover will create 30 new jobs in the next 3 years.
Support the adoption of clean technologies: with the LightWeeding technology, Earth Rover allows for a reduction of up to 50% in the use of chemicals in agriculture, thus reducing damage to biodiversity.
Support sustainable food production: weeding is one of the important challenges in organic food production, the solution brought by Earth Rover ensures a cheaper and more advantageous method for weeding in organic farms. At the same time, the solution improves food production productivity, since the laser weeders from Earth Rover do not damage the soil and do not result in crop loss due to mechanical weeding.

Indirect

Support to innovation and R&D: increasing research efforts for technology in agriculture has the potential to raise rural productivity and encourage innovation.

Impact indicators
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jobs

Created by our projects

Contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals
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About the Promoter

About

EARTH ROVER LIMITED

Earth Rover Limited was founded in 2017 with the objective of developing technology to produce fresh and chemical-free agricultural products and make them available to all farmers.

The company now produces robots that automate scouting, harvesting, and weed-killing processes by using AI and advanced data collection technologies. These features will help decrease reliance on chemicals, improve production efficiency, and reduce waste. Earth Rover was born in the United Kingdom but plans to expand to other parts of Europe in the short term to make this more sustainable production technology “a norm among farmers”.

Meet the team:

James Brown, Co-founder, farmer non-executive Chairman

Luke Robinson, Co-founder, CSO non-executive

David Whitewood, CEO

Ricard Pardell, CTO

James Barlow, CFO

Promoter website

https://www.earthrover.farm/

Business Model
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