Muddy Machines Ltd

We need to develop technologies today that make our food system resilient against labour supply shocks.
Our first product in our robot platform is an autonomous green asparagus harvester.

We have built and successfully tested our robot during the 2021 harvest season with the largest Asparagus farmer in the UK, Cobrey Farms.
They have now put in a pre-order for 2021 for harvest services of 5 robots.

We have so far raised £450k in venture funding and won over £500k in Innovate UK grants.
We have a team of 5 engineers working full time on our technology.

We extract and retain significant amounts of new value from a large, well-established market;
Our customers are large vegetable growers that require over 200 labourers each year.

The labour market for selectively harvested field vegetables is $5.6bn per annum in our target markets Europe and North/South America.
In light of increased demand for domestically grown fresh and nutritious vegetables, this market is set for strong growth over the next 10 years.

For Asparagus, our core target markets are UK, Spain, Germany, Italy, France, USA, Canada and ultimately Mexico and Peru.
Each market is consolidated with about 5-10 growers responsible for 80% of the production.

Farmers of selectively harvested field vegetables (broccoli, asparagus, beans, artichokes etc.) are facing severe labour shortages and need a reliable automated harvest solution.
For example, A shortage of 10 workers in Asparagus causes the grower £250k in losses.

We solve one of the largest fundamental problems facing humanity: how to feed itself as population and standards-of-living increase, alongside the added stresses of climate change.

We have built a lightweight (compared to a tractor), electrically powered, self-driving field robot that can independently recognise and pick crops that are ready to harvest.

There are no serious competitors in the green asparagus space.
There are numerous companies that target the harvest of other crops
Naio- vineyards
Xihelm -Tomatoes
Dogtooth, Saga Robotics - Strawberries
Tortuga, Four Growers, Earth Rover

As this is a nascent industry, nobody has more than 1% market share.

We hold the dominant position (through partnerships, IP, Innovate-UK support) in the most attractive niche  for autonomous food production (as defined by the intersection between suitability for robotisation and crop-value);

We expect to hit over £10m in harvest service revenues over the next 4 years.
This can potentially come from our lead customer with whom we already have a commercial agreement.
We provide our service at the same cost compared to human labourers giving us very good margins to continue our product development.
Over time we expect our data services revenue stream to overtake the harvest service revenue stream.

We provide a harvest service that is charged by the kilogram of produce harvested. (Harvest as a service).
On top of that, we provide yield- and profit-enhancing data services.
Profitability is driven by the hardware costs of our machines and the level of autonomy and pick speed they can achieve.
We already have connections and contracts with customers in place.
Essentially, we are a SaaS company with a comparatively straightforward and well-understood hardware element.

Hiring Engineering Talent, building a company work-shop and producing 5 robots for the 2022 season.

Equity investment
Aiming for a valuation of £5m+

We are exposed to the potential battery supply shortage that the entire automotive and robotics industry is facing in the next few years.

Entrepreneur First London 2020
Central Research Lab / Plus X Accelerator 2021

We expecting to be granted a patent on our end effector (the harvest gripper arm) technology by October 2021