Upside Robotics

Upside Robotics develops lightweight, solar-powered autonomous field robots that apply fertilizer and nutrients to corn on a per-plant basis during the growing season. The robots are 22 inches wide so they can travel between 30-inch corn rows without damaging the crop, weigh about 150 pounds to limit soil compaction, carry a 50-litre (13-gallon) tank that refills automatically at a base station, run about 10 hours on a charge with a 60-minute recharge, and cover roughly one acre per hour, or up to 100 acres per week per unit. Onboard sensors collect ground-level crop, soil and weather data, which is combined with satellite imagery, yield maps and SWAT maps and processed by proprietary algorithms to decide when, where and how much fertilizer to apply.

The company positions the system against conventional practice in which growers make a single, front-loaded, uniform fertilizer pass with heavy equipment. It states that only about 30% of conventionally applied fertilizer is taken up by the crop, and reports that its customers have cut fertilizer use by up to 70%, equivalent to roughly $150 per acre per season, while reducing nitrogen leaching and N2O emissions. The current product line is corn-only; corn was selected because it is one of the most fertilizer-intensive crops. The website markets pre-orders for a 2027 model called the Maize Runner, and lists five hardware generations between February 2024 and a Gen 5 planned for April 2026.

The team is led by co-founder and CEO Jana Tian and co-founder and CTO Sam Dugan, supported by founding hardware, software and agronomy staff, a production specialist, robotics technician, fractional CFO, operations specialist and grant specialist listed on the company's about page.

Founding story

Jana Tian and Sam Dugan met in 2023 at the Entrepreneurs First accelerator (described in one account as meeting at the Velocity incubator in San Francisco), both seeking to build a company at the intersection of climate and agriculture. Tian, born in Slovenia and raised in London, U.K., had worked as a chemical engineer in Unilever's food division and as a food developer for Ben & Jerry's, where she worked with growers; Dugan, a Canadian from Waterloo and a University of Waterloo BASc '22 graduate, had been building robots since age 10 and was working on drones. They initially explored drone-based fertilizer application but moved to ground robots because nutrients must reach the roots rather than the leaves. The company was launched in February 2024 while the founders were in San Francisco, and they relocated to Ontario, citing Waterloo's mechatronics program and hardware-software ecosystem, Ontario's roughly $2 billion annual corn crop, and Canada's mandate to cut fertilizer use 30% by 2030. During the first growing season the pair lived in a camper trailer beside client corn fields to iterate on the robots in real time.

Business model

Upside Robotics sells or supplies its own robots to corn growers, taking pre-orders for future model years (the 2027 Maize Runner) through its website. Contact forms reference pricing and billing, sales and reservation agreements. Sources do not specify whether the offering is an outright equipment sale, a service, or a subscription.

Not specified in the available sources beyond references to pre-orders/reservations, pricing and billing, and a cost structure the company says is designed to return a grower's investment in less than a year.

Traction

Growth from four clients and roughly 70 acres in 2024 to about 1,200 acres in 2025 and more than 3,000 corn acres and 22 farms for 2026, with a waitlist of over 200 farms and reported 100% customer retention. Cumulative operations reported at the time of the seed round include more than 10,000 autonomous kilometers driven and over 100,000 liters of fertilizer applied across more than 1,300 acres. Company-reported operating metrics show 872 km driven in 2024 versus 10,500 km in 2025 (10,000 of them autonomous) and 2,500+ automated charges, with a 2026 target of 40,000 fully autonomous kilometers and 10,000+ automated charges.

Latest developments

In February 2026 Upside Robotics announced a $7.5 million USD seed round led by Plural with participation from Garage Capital, Entrepreneurs First and the founders of Clearpath Robotics, bringing total funding to more than $11 million USD according to the University of Waterloo. Capital is directed at R&D, meeting waitlist demand and entering the U.S. corn belt. A fifth-generation robot is slated for April 2026 and pre-orders are open for the 2027 Maize Runner.