Meet Florian Richter & Christopher Chavasse, Founders of Muddy Machines

Invest in startups like Muddy Machines alongside Climate Capital here.

Founders: Florian Richter, Christopher Chavasse

Motto:  🔭 Vision > To sustainably solve agriculture’s labour challenges with robots. 🌱💡🧑‍🌾🚨🤖

Year Founded: 2020

Stage: Seed

Location: London, UK

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Climate Capital: What made you want to solve this problem?

Florian:  Chris and Florian strongly believe in the big impact that farming has on the planet and the climate. That's why they wanted to make a positive impact to farmers and solve a problem that really matters. There is a massive labour shortage in farming today and unharvested crops are rotting in the field. Increasingly, production in 1st world countries is unviable as a result and causes large carbon emissions from longer and longer supply chains.

Climate Capital: What are you building?

Florian: Muddy Machines is solving the labour shortage problem with an electrically powered, light-weight, autonomous field robot platform called SPROUT that can carry a variety of harvest tools that can harvest a variety of field vegetables more accurately and more quickly than humans.

Expanding domestic production in consumer markets can save millions of tonnes of CO2 in food miles and also increases the resilience of the food system by making fresher, more nutritious food more readily available.

Climate Capital: What is next?

Florian:  We are launching 5 harvest robots in 2023 with the largest British asparagus grower and are going to generate our first revenue. Over the summer we aim to raise our Series A to collect funds to build additional robots and grow revenues further.

Climate Capital: What are the core elements of the culture you are building at your company?

Florian:

🧑‍🌾 Farmer Focused

Engage with farmers and growers, listen to their needs, share our ideas, plans and approaches. Get feedback often and act on it. Our farmers entrust us with their businesses and their livelihoods.

When we mess up or miss a deadline, it matters. We take that responsibility seriously.

🙌 Ownership

It’s your company, do s--t that matters. Own your actions, decisions and mistakes. Have a growth mindset and use mistakes as opportunities to learn and improve for the next time.

It’s your office, workshop and lab, keep it clean, tidy and organised.*

🏆 Relentlessness

Be relentless in achieving your goals and execute them with urgency. Don’t be put off by failure, rejection, or bugs. The biggest breakthroughs and achievements come at the most challenging points.

Try something else, keep on going.

💎 Quality

Always strive for excellence and quality in everything you do. Design, usability, interactions. Customers, investors and the general public notice. 

Buy cheap, buy twice.

🧘 Health and Wellbeing

Take care of yourself physically and mentally. Stay active. Talk to someone and share if you’re struggling

Climate Capital: What are the key challenges as you scale your company?

Florian: It is difficult to turn a robotics business into a venture case. Investors often cannot see past the high capital-intensity of the business, let alone in agriculture where investors are yet to gather more experience. After all, if you want to make more money, you need to build more robots...

However, we are confident that by following a 'Robotics as a Service business model and our platform approach we can maximise the monetisation potential of a robot by using it nearly year-round.

As we scale and demonstrate steady recurring revenue streams we know we can work with lenders to raise additional funds for expanding the robot fleet.

Climate Capital: What have you learned that you want to share with other founders?

Florian: Look after the relationship with your co-founder and invest in both of your wellbeing.

You can not start early enough with building a strong company culture.

Climate Capital: How can the broader climate community help you on your mission?

Florian: Raise awareness about the labour shortage problem in farming and how at the end of the day only farmers that are doing well will be able to join the fight against climate change.