Startups

How Delaware’s TRIC Robotics is impacting California agriculture

The homegrown robotics startup is now growing its technology on the West Coast.

Adam Stager and Vishnu Somasundaram of TRIC Robotics. (Courtesy Adam Stager)

Editor’s note: This story first appeared as a newsletter alongside a roundup of Technical.ly’s best reporting from the week, job openings and more. Subscribe here to get updates on Delaware tech, business and innovation news in your inbox on Thursdays.


TRIC Robotics developed its agtech — robots that bathe strawberry crops in UV-C light as an alternative to pesticides — at the University of Delaware. The company then tested the bots in the fields of Fifer Orchards in Kent County, as well as sites in Georgetown and Kernersville. In 2020, TRIC won the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce’s Swim with the Sharks competition.

Recently, the homegrown biz received its biggest funding milestone, and biggest national kudos, yet: $965,000 from the National Science Foundation, which combined with a $625,000 grant from the USDA positions the startup for a promising 2023.

To really get TRIC off the ground, founder Adam Stager decided to make a major move to where 90% of the industry’s strawberries are grown: Central California.

“We ended up taking two of the platforms that we had designed for the East Coast and we just threw them on top of the SUV and came out to California,” Stager said. “That really helped us get through to the R&D phase and we were getting really great results, it was a very visible difference in crop health.”

The biggest challenge has been keeping up with the demand for the tech, which has evolved to be bigger and capable of treating larger crops.

“I just had these little robots that were constantly breaking that I had built in my garage in Delaware and they just weren’t up to the task of going to the large California Farm,” Stager said. “So we just took the plunge and basically bootstrapped a very large version of this, a tractor-sized version of it. This year, we put that on a five-acre farm with the customer paying and started to get good results.”

The company’s tech at work:

A UV-C robot treating crops at night.

The newer, bigger UV-C robots. (Courtesy photo)

While California is very much where the strawberry farms are, Stager sees potential for bringing the evolved tech back to Delaware.

“A really exciting idea for me is bringing the strawberries back to Delaware,” he said. “Right now there’s so much pest pressure, especially with mold and the wetness that we have on the East Coast. That makes it really difficult to grow strawberries, but Delaware’s in such a great population center where we can distribute to all these big cities that it would be a really high profitability crop for farmers in Delaware.”

In the meantime, Stager and his growing team are focused on bringing the technology to market as a service business model.

You could say growth is top of mind.

“I think we’re really on the cusp of getting this to market acceptance, which is when a farmer would consider it to be an equal or better equivalent to what they’ve been doing for so many years now,” Stager said. “We’ll be doing 95 acres next year. We’re bringing the farmers on board and they’re seeing the value.”

Check out this short clip to see TRIC robots in action:

Companies: TRIC Robotics

Before you go...

Please consider supporting Technical.ly to keep our independent journalism strong. Unlike most business-focused media outlets, we don’t have a paywall. Instead, we count on your personal and organizational support.

3 ways to support our work:
  • Contribute to the Journalism Fund. Charitable giving ensures our information remains free and accessible for residents to discover workforce programs and entrepreneurship pathways. This includes philanthropic grants and individual tax-deductible donations from readers like you.
  • Use our Preferred Partners. Our directory of vetted providers offers high-quality recommendations for services our readers need, and each referral supports our journalism.
  • Use our services. If you need entrepreneurs and tech leaders to buy your services, are seeking technologists to hire or want more professionals to know about your ecosystem, Technical.ly has the biggest and most engaged audience in the mid-Atlantic. We help companies tell their stories and answer big questions to meet and serve our community.
The journalism fund Preferred partners Our services
Engagement

Join our growing Slack community

Join 5,000 tech professionals and entrepreneurs in our community Slack today!

Trending

19 tech and entrepreneurship events to check out before the holidays

EDA officials are ‘hopeful’ Tech Hubs program will live on under Trump

AI is being used in more and more of the hiring process, especially at high-volume companies

This Week in Jobs: 27 hot open roles to warm up a frosty career

Technically Media