A month ago, TRIC Robotics’ autonomous robot Luna went viral on YouTube, X, LinkedIn and more, running at night in a California strawberry field.
“I think there’s probably a healthy dose of luck that’s involved with that,” says Adam Stager, CEO of TRIC Robotics. “But also, it was really good timing.”
Stager explains that TRIC Robotics uses UV-C light to control pests and diseases through a fleet of robots on the farm. Organisms have a DNA repair mechanism activated by light, which TRIC Robotics avoids triggering while running at night.
“Because we do this treatment at night, we’re able to create the damage without having that repair mechanism activated,” he says.
Stager joined “The Packer Podcast” to talk about this viral video and the growing interest from consumers and growers alike for chemical-free alternative pest and disease control.
The video, originally shared by Danny Bernstein, CEO of The Reservoir, was a perfect fit for a social media push, Stager says.
“This is a testament to the ag tech community,” he says. “I did not expect Saturday morning to wake up with millions of views and thousands of comments on it. So, that was incredible.”
He says one interesting point as the video circulated online was with the platform X. The post on the site got a lot of feedback and questions, and Stager says he spent some time fielding those inquiries. But then, he says Grok, X’s chatbot, began to take over as users tagged it.
“I was scrolling through the comments,” he says. “I was so impressed by how well Grok already knew our company, the technology and could educate people about all of that. So, I think X might be the best place to go viral if you have some kind of like scientific component of your company.”
Scaling Up Mindfully
Stager shares how he founded his company out of a garage in Delaware and has focused on scaling in a mindful way. He says focusing on the business operations side of the company is absolutely critical. He says while a lot of startups look to technology as a place of focus, an important step is to focus on the details while scaling because small things for a startup become bigger issues as a company scales up.
“You’re starting to go from lone robot to lots of robots; you have to really be intentional about the things that could go wrong on those robots,” he says. “Maybe you’re just getting started, and you’re building your first robot and every month you have one repair that you have to make or one problem that you have to solve. But as you start to get, like, maybe 30 robots now — if it’s happening one day on each robot, then you’re getting to every single day, [and] you’ve got a problem that you need to solve.
“One of the most obvious things that you really have to be careful around when you start scaling up is don’t scale too fast,” he adds.
Stager says it’s also important to think about processes, which become necessary as an ag tech startup begins to grow.
“As you start to build a fleet, you really need to build out good processes for everything from the robots and hardware all the way to the people,” he says. “You want to make sure that there’s a great onboarding process, that people have a good experience coming into the company, [that] we can maintain culture.”
A Service-Based Model
Stager also explains why it was important to build TRIC Robotics as a service provider instead of as an equipment manufacturer. He says this was an intentional choice built around grower feedback and understanding the economics needed to work both for TRIC and for the growers.
“In our market, strawberry farmers tend to pay for their sprays as a service,” he says. “We provided it to them in a similar way that they pay today, because that is something that fits really well into their business model.”
Stager says a per-acre and per-application fee helped TRIC cover more ground and have a better cash flow. Since the California strawberry industry is geographically dense, the company could cover a lot of acres and charge a similar rate to what growers pay for chemical applications.
“You also have to have good enough economics where you can stand up a business,” he says. “Otherwise, you take a lot of the farmer’s time to build a new technology. But in the end, if your business can’t stand up on its own, then you can’t actually solve that problem in the long term and you just waste everyone’s time building a technology that can’t scale.”
The Power of Focus
As for the future, Stager says it’s easy to think the company might want to look at other commodities; he sees expanding TRIC Robotics’ service model to more strawberry growers as an important next step.
“We’re trying not to get too ahead of our skis,” he says. “Since we are a service business, we have to carry that capex [capital expenditure]. We have to pay for the robots up front and then pay them off over time in some sense. I’d say there’s a huge opportunity where we are today to just really become a fairly large company without going too far. … Sometimes the fastest way to grow is to focus.”
