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Farming is changing fast, and a young Canadian startup called Upside Robotics is right in the middle of that shift. Based in Waterloo and nurtured inside the University of Waterloo’s Velocity incubator, the company has just raised a $7.5 million seed round to push its autonomous farming robots into many more fields.
It is a big step for a team that only started a couple of seasons ago and is already working hand in hand with farmers across North America.
Upside Robotics was co-founded by Sam Dugan and Jana Tian, two engineers who saw how much fertilizer and fuel gets wasted in traditional row-crop farming. Instead of building another giant tractor, they designed lightweight, AI-enabled robots that quietly drive between crop rows and drop fertilizer only where plants actually need it. The robots can be monitored and controlled remotely, so farmers can check in on their fields and adjust nutrient plans from a phone or laptop, not from a tractor cab.
The new $7.5 million seed funding round is led by Plural, with support from Garage Capital, Entrepreneurs First, and the founders of Clearpath Robotics. With this round, Upside Robotics has now raised more than $11 million in total funding to build out its platform and scale deployments.
The investors are betting that precise, automated fertilization is not just a nice-to-have add-on, but a core tool for keeping farms profitable while cutting emissions and runoff.
What makes Upside’s approach interesting is the way they connect robotics, data, and soil health. In the company’s field trials, their systems have already logged more than 10,000 autonomous kilometers and applied over 100,000 liters of fertilizer across roughly 1,300 acres. Instead of blanketing a field with the same rate everywhere, the robots can deliver the right amount directly at the root zone, cutting waste and reducing the risk of nutrients washing away.
Farmers seem to notice the difference. According to recent reports, Upside Robotics has helped customers reduce fertilizer use by up to 70%, which can translate to nearly $150 in savings per acre per season.
In just two growing seasons, the company moved from testing on about 70 acres to preparing for more than 3,000 acres, all while keeping 100% customer retention and building a waitlist of over 200 farms.
For a hardware-heavy startup working in real farm conditions, that kind of pull from the market is a strong signal.
Dugan often talks about a future where farmers can “effortlessly manage their operations remotely” with constant analytics and simple, actionable insights. That vision is not just about convenience. By decoupling nutrient delivery from heavy machinery and by treating each part of a field differently, Upside wants to line up farm profitability with climate goals and regenerative practices.
In other words, the same robot that saves money on inputs can also help protect soils and reduce emissions.
The Velocity connection is a big part of the story. Since 2008, the University of Waterloo’s flagship incubator has helped launch more than 500 startups, together generating over $40 billion in enterprise value, and Upside Robotics is one of its latest agri-tech bets. Being part of that network gives the team access to mentors, fellow founders, and early-stage investors who understand both deep tech and the messy reality of turning prototypes into real products.
With this fresh seed round, the company is gearing up for the next phase. Upside Robotics plans to scale deployments on existing customer farms, expand into the U.S. corn belt, and invest in more R&D to refine its robots and software. That likely means more automation features, better analytics dashboards, and tighter integrations with tools farmers already use to plan and track their operations.
For farmers, the promise is straightforward: less time in the field, less wasted fertilizer, and healthier soils. For the founders, this seed round is a chance to prove that climate-smart farm automation can scale beyond pilots and demos into a staple of mainstream row-crop production.
If they succeed, the robots gliding between corn rows in Ontario today could soon become a familiar sight across North America’s most productive farmland.
futureTEKnow
Editorial Team
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