Upside Robotics is working to reduce fertilizer use and waste in corn crops

The founders of Upside Robotics met in 2023 because they were looking to build an impactful company that touched climate and agriculture. Less than a year later, they were sleeping in a wagon on the side of a Canadian cornfield while building their robotics startup.

Upside Robotics, based in Waterloo, Ontario, builds lightweight, solar-powered autonomous robots that deliver just the right amounts of fertilizer and nutrients to crops when they need them. The company’s software runs on proprietary algorithms to decipher when and how much fertilizer plants need using weather and soil data.

Upside’s robots are currently working on corn plants — one of the most fertilizer-intensive crops — which Upside chose for precisely this reason, Jana Tian, ​​co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.

After Tian and Sam Duggan, co-founder and CTO, met at the Entrepreneur First accelerator, they decided to focus on reducing fertilizer waste with robotics because it directly fit the Venn diagram center of their interests. They are also well inclined towards their backgrounds.

Dugan had been building robots since he was 10 years old, and Tian had years of experience as a chemical engineer in Unilever’s food division.

Customer discovery with farmers also confirmed that this was an area where farmers were willing to pay for a better method.

“Traditionally, the way fertilizers are used, only 30% of the total fertilizer is consumed by the crop, so most of it is wasted,” Tian said. “Farmers usually do one operation per season, so they have to front-load a lot of fertilizer. But crops need fertilizer during the season as well. We knew there was this problem that a lot of our farmers wanted to find different solutions to.”

The duo officially founded Upside Robotics in 2024 and then hit the fields — literally.

“We actually bought a camper trailer and went from field to field,” Duggan said. “We stayed on the side of the field every night, and we walked, sometimes around the clock. We spent every hour of the day in a cornfield at some point.”

Dugan built a robot in two weeks so they could start testing their idea. This device was a remote-controlled car that Dugan and Tian would operate manually. They followed the robot around the fields to collect data and demonstrate to farmers how the fertilization system worked.

“We implemented our manual applications in the first year, and that allowed us to iterate very quickly, not just on the hardware side, but learning by being with the farmers,” Tian said. “Some of our farmers said we probably spent more time in their fields than they had in their entire lives. This allowed us to finish the work quickly. None of us were farmers, which gave us first-hand experience of what it is like to be farmers.”

After spending the 2024 season proving the company’s concept, they spent this off-season developing their fourth generation robot for the 2025 growing season. Their acreage went from 70 acres in 2024 to 1,200 acres in 2025.

The company is now preparing to serve more than 3,000 acres in the upcoming 2026 season, with 100% customer retention from the beginning. Upside reports that it has so far helped its customers reduce fertilizer use by 70% which equates to about $150 in savings per acre per season.

Upside recently raised a $7.5 million seed funding round led by Plural with participation from Garage Capital and the founders of Clearpath Robotics.

The funding will be used to continue funding research and development and keep up with demand, with over 200 farms on their waiting list. The company also hopes to expand outside of Canada with the aim of breaking into the US Corn Belt.

“People always ask if farmers will embrace new solutions, and they certainly do, and that’s something we’ve learned firsthand, as long as you can give them a clear idea.” [return on investment] “A clear reason behind building this technology,” Tian said. “In our case, we didn’t have to sell it to farmers. In many cases, our farmers have already requested this solution.”