Progression as a company over the last year.
In the last few years there has been a clear focus on deploying and demonstrating ROBOTTI around Europe. This is the best way to prove the robustness, reliability and the commercial value. In the last two years Covid-19 had a big impact on the company and its activities, limiting the possibilities of moving around. The reliability of ROBOTTI is already getting proven by the number of approaches from the third parties – there are many companies and people believing in the technology that we have developed. AGROINTELLI has been progressing significantly over the last year. Our capital structure has been strengthened. The “capital equity injections” from our two main investors – Nordic Alpha Partners and Vækstfonden have enabled us to scale up, both commercially and in terms of operations and production.
We have aligned our organization so we have been focusing our sales activities towards distributors to establish a very tight distributors network all over Europe. We have started onboarding quite a lot of distributors, e.g. UK, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Italy, but we also saw an interest in Australia and overseas. We have been also focusing much on end-customer and not so much on universities and research institutes. We have focused on quality insurance on our production and procurement and we are continuously working on our risk assessment on ROBOTTI to ensure that we have one of the safest robots in the world. We have technologies to support the safety of ROBOTTI with 10 different systems related to safety.
We have established a relationship to a number of implement manufactures both traditional and intelligent implements. They were interested to change the design to fit even better to ROBOTTI. Examples of traditional implements: Schmotzer weeder, Danfoil sprayer and other are in progress. We are also working with manufacturers of intelligent implements, where we combine different types of autonomous technologies with our robot, e.g. in harvesting. Last summer we expanded our activities in Germany with establishment of an office and demonstration field in southwest part of the country, in Baden-Württemberg state. It is placed in a strategic position, making it much easier to support ROBOTTI’s distributors and activities around Europe.
In December we have won Agritechnica’s Silver Innovation Award for RoboVeg ROBOTTI, fully autonomous broccoli harvester. The same month we have introduced the new model – ROBOTTI LR, which is built upon the experiences of ROBOTTI 150D. The main difference is that ROBOTTI LR is designed for nonPTO operations, has one motor, and is able to drive up to 60 hours before the next refueling.
How do you see the market going forward and future
plans?
There is a clear trend in the market towards more and more automation. We expect the market to increase continuously. There is a need of automatization of operations as it is considerably difficult to get labor. “AGROINTELLI will keep developing its technology to be able to offer autonomous solutions to the market, so the existing workforce can do other tasks, that are creating more value.” – says Jakob Bebe, AGROINTELLI’s CCO. Agriculture is a special industry and it is a task to convince such conservative customers as farmers to robots. They have to believe in it so we have to change their mindset to embrace this technology. Since ROBOTTI can take over the repetitive work, the farmers can save the lacking workforce and this is one of most convincing arguments. On our side it is a matter of showing that ROBOTTI can handle capacity and it is reliable. We are going to do that this year by operating on fields from 20 to 200 ha.
Where farmers can see the robots.
An option available at all times is our “ROBOTTI” YouTube channel. Another source is our website, there is an option “book a demo”. You are always welcome to call us to hear more. In there you can also see where the nearest distributors are located. All AGROINTELLI’s distributors, without an exception, have a demo robot, which is meant to be shown to the potential customers and those that are interested in this technology. Customers can also see it in Denmark at our production facilities and the headquarter. We are planning to make various demonstrations in the countries in which we don’t have currently distributors.
We, or our distributors, are going to present the robot at the agricultural fairs. DLG Feldtage, SIMA, FIRA – are only some of them. A new activity that we have already started are field trips to the existing customers so farmers can talk to farmers about the experiences with ROBOTTI.