SEED Innovations has put £300,000 into Fieldwork Robotics, taking an approximate 3.66% stake in the UK agricultural technology firm building autonomous berry-harvesting robots.
The subscription forms part of a £2.5 million Seed+ round that Fieldwork is raising to push its technology beyond validation and into commercial trials. The aim is to accelerate adoption on farms and shift the business towards scaled deployment.
The problem Fieldwork is targeting is a costly one. Up to 30% of soft fruit is lost because growers can’t find enough pickers, which squeezes margins and feeds through to shelf prices.
Fieldwork’s answer is a robot with four independent arms, each fitted with a patented inflatable membrane that lifts fruit without bruising it, guided by AI-enabled 3D vision and ripeness detection. One operator can supervise the lot.
Crucially for the investment case, the company isn’t relying on hardware sales alone. It is building recurring revenue through data services, maintenance contracts and a harvesting-as-a-service model, where growers pay to use the robots rather than buy them outright. That mix of upfront and recurring income is what gives the technology room to scale.
Fieldwork already has commercial and development relationships across the UK, Australia, Portugal and the United States, and has worked through several generations of its harvesting robots. International expansion is now firmly on the agenda.
Jim Mellon, Non-Executive Chair of SEED, said Fieldwork “epitomises how AI and robots can solve a very real-life problem,” and that the firm offers a scalable fix to the labour shortage holding growers back.