Charlie Andersen, CEO of Burro: $12 Million Raised to Build the Future of Autonomous Farming

In today's episode of Category Visionaries, we speak with Charlie Andersen, CEO of Burro, an autonomous farming startup that’s raised over $12 Million in funding, about why human-robot collaboration is the future of the agriculture sector. Having grown up on a farm, Charlie understands the challenges facing contemporary farmers more than most people. Burro is determined to provide scalable, practical solutions for what Charlie describes as ‘some of the hardest working people on Earth.’ Their vision is that by allowing robots to handle some of the essential mobility and logistics work, human laborers have more time to focus on the complex, critical tasks they’ll always be better at.

We also spoke about the current state of the farming industry and the pressure on producers to do more with less, why a significant amount of labor (and income) is wasted on basic mobility tasks, and how automated assistants can be beneficial to everyone involved in the Industry. We also discussed the future of robots in farming, and why the idea that they might replace humans is probably best left to the world of sci-fi.

Topics Discussed:

• How farming led Charlie to the world of automated technology, and why he had always held a passion for the more industrial side of agriculture
• The current state of modern agriculture, and why technology is needed to keep things working in the future
• Why migrant farm laborers are some of the hardest working people on Earth, and how Burro’s technology is there to support, not supplant them
• Why Charlie doesn’t see much competition in the autonomous farming space, and the challenges of developing functional product solutions
• Why developing a prototype might excite the market, but building a market-ready model is a totally different thing
• The future of autonomous technology in farming, and why human-robot collaboration is more likely that a machine labor revolution