Harvesting fresh raspberries is a market segment that is hard to service. Yet it is a $2 billion+ market with 22% compound annual growth rate. Currently about 30% of the crop (more than one year of growth) is lost because of a lack of human harvesters.
Fieldwork Robotics has been spun-out from the University of Plymouth with the aim of supporting growers to remain competitive. Growers face an increasing shortage of human harvesters in a business with low net margins and small bargaining power. Fieldwork aims to use robotics to fill the gap left by humans while supporting food safety.
Rui Andres has an engineering background in energy and robotics and has worked in both innovation and corporate venture capital. He is currently the CEO of Fieldwork – responsible for strategy, finance, and growth.
Rui identifies that the Shott Scale up Accelerator will help with different ways to manage teams effectively. He intends to use the support of the mentors to discuss some of the aspects that the Board tends to ignore, such as culture, because he sees these as critical for the success of the company and employee retention.
He notes “until I joined as CEO my role was working with homogeneous teams (investment); in Fieldwork I work with heterogeneous teams with different skills and mentalities (for example, software/hardware) and I’m keen to learn how to avoid silos as we grow and how to make the bridge/maintain dialogue between different teams.”
Fieldwork plans to grow from two robots with the client to 40 in the next 18 months. It also wants to sign up more customers, place more robots with existing customers, prepare to scale-up manufacture, and use this as a platform to expand into other crops and services.
Associated Programme
