An innovator's journey is never a straight line.

In the midst of the first Covid-19 lockdown, Chris joined Entrepreneurs First, looking for worthwhile problems to solve in agriculture. After many interviews, zoom calls and online conferences, it became clear that reliable access to manual labour was a massive issue in agriculture. Muddy Machines was born.

We closed a pre-seed funding round led by Britbots, joined by Robotics Ventures and some amazing business angels who shared our vision for sustainable agriculture.

Following another successful harvest season testing Sprout and the asparagus harvester at Cobrey Farms in Gloucestershire, we expanded the team to fifteen people. We were joined by more design engineers, software wizards and our first head of talent.

Our first asparagus harvesting prototype was built in Chris's basement. Once complete he managed to successfully get it to harvest green asparagus, albeit out of a fake flowerbed with shop-bought asparagus! It was time to start building the robot 'Sprout' to move the harvester into the field.

With our first fully assembled robot, Sprout, we headed to the fields to get our wheels muddy, live up to our name, and start testing in a real field for the first time!

Having designed, built and tested Sprout and the asparagus harvester exhaustively in 2023, the start of this year saw us achieve our first autonomous herd mission with several robots out in the field, a huge milestone.