Verdant Robotics
Verdant is a RaaS company focused on spraying.
Summary
Verdant is a Robotics-as-a-Service company creating autonomous robots focused on crop spraying and thinning. Their first robots are focused on automated chemical spraying and apple thinning.
Why We Invested
- Exceptional management team with outstanding academic credentials and successful startup track record. Team has experience at Google X, NASA and several autonomous vehicle companies.
- Large potential market with no competitors in apple thinning and none to very few threatening competitors in adjacent markets.
- Execution so far has been strong. Team moved quickly and has made significant progress on their prototype in a short period of time.
- Strong co-investors that derisks future financing.
Contact Verdant Robotics
Team
Gabe Sibley
CEO/Cofounder
Gabe has worked as a professor and on startups simultaneously in the last decade. He has worked as a professor of CS at GWU and CU Boulder. In 2013 he started working for Google on Tango, he was CSO at Zoox and cofounded Zippy in 2017 which was acquired by Cruise Automation in 2018. Gabe has a BS in Mathematics and CS from Emory and a PhD from USC in CS. He completed his postdoc at Oxford.
Curtis Garner
COO
Curtis is the ag brain at Verdant. He started as an Operations Manager for the Morning Star Packing company, the world's largest tomato processing company. He then became a Senior Farm Analyst at Bowles Farming Company, a large Central Californian family farm.
Chris Leger
VP of Systems Architecture
Chris started his career as a robotics/software engineer for NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab at Caltech. He worked there for 12 years on various world-renowned projects including the Mars Curiosity Rover as the Software Development Lead. He moved to Google where he worked as an engineer on autonomous driving software, high resolution earth imaging and Google X's largest robotics project. Chris has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon.