@benderbrook_farms No Broke Boys For This Robot #ontag #fyp #mini4pro #dji #farming #dairyfarming #farmtok #corn #nitrogen #robot #fertilizer #johndeere #case #cowchow #2025 #farming #autonomy #kern #blowthisupforme #upsiderobotics ♬ original sound - BenderBrook

🌾 Where Country Meets Code

Blake Shelton’s “Corn”—a song that celebrates the grit, rhythm, and quiet heroism of life in the fields—becomes an unexpectedly perfect echo to Upside Robotics’ story. The track’s heartbeat of rural pride mirrors the founders’ months spent living in a camper on the edge of Canadian cornfields, learning the land row by row. Shelton sings about the culture, labor, and identity rooted in corn country, and Upside’s robots step directly into that world—not to replace it, but to honor it with smarter, lighter, more sustainable tools. In the same way the song elevates the everyday beauty of farm life, Upside Robotics elevates the future of farming itself, proving that innovation grows best when it grows from the ground up.

🎶 🌽🤖🔋🌱🚜✨🌍📈🧪🌾💡🚐🔭 🔊 Corn - Blake Shelton

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“We wanted to build something that mattered.” — Co‑founders Sam Dugan (BASc ’22) & Jana Tian

From that shared conviction, Upside Robotics was born. What began as a simple desire to build meaningful climate‑focused technology quickly evolved into a mission to reinvent how agriculture uses fertilizer. In just a few seasons, the founders went from brainstorming in an accelerator to sleeping in a camper beside Canadian cornfields, determined to build a robotics company that could reshape farming from the ground up.

🌱 A Meeting of Minds and Missions

Upside Robotics emerged in 2023 when Sam Dugan and Jana Tian met at the Entrepreneurs First accelerator, each searching for a way to create an impact‑driven company at the intersection of climate and agriculture. Their shared interests converged on a stubborn agricultural challenge: fertilizer waste. With complementary backgrounds—Dugan in robotics since childhood and Tian in chemical engineering—they saw an opportunity to build technology that could make farming more efficient, sustainable, and profitable.

🚐 Building a Startup From the Side of a Cornfield

Less than a year later, the pair were living out of a camper parked beside sprawling cornfields in Ontario. They spent long days—and many nights—walking row after row, gathering data and learning directly from farmers. This immersive fieldwork became the foundation of Upside Robotics’ early development. Instead of designing technology from a distance, they built it shoulder‑to‑shoulder with the people who would use it.

🤖 Robots Designed for Precision and Sustainability

From those fields came Upside’s lightweight, solar‑powered autonomous robots, engineered to deliver precise, right‑sized doses of fertilizer exactly when crops need them. Their proprietary algorithms analyze soil and weather data to determine timing and quantity, dramatically reducing waste. Focusing first on corn—one of the most fertilizer‑intensive crops—Upside has helped farmers cut fertilizer use by up to 70%, saving roughly $150 per acre per season while reducing environmental impact.

🌾 From Prototype to Scale

After manually operating early prototypes in 2024, the founders spent the off‑season building their fourth‑generation robot for the 2025 growing cycle. They expanded from 70 acres to 1,200 acres in a single year and are preparing to serve more than 3,000 acres in 2026. With 100% customer retention and more than 200 farms on the waitlist, Upside’s traction reflects a simple truth: farmers adopt new technology when the value is undeniable.

🌎 A Growing Vision for North America

With a $7.5 million seed round led by Plural—joined by Garage Capital and the founders of Clearpath Robotics—Upside Robotics is scaling rapidly. The company plans to expand beyond Canada into the U.S. corn belt, where fertilizer inefficiency is both a challenge and an opportunity. For Dugan and Tian, the mission remains clear: empower farmers with robotics that are economically compelling, environmentally restorative, and built with a deep respect for the land.

#AgTechRevolution 🌱🤖 #ClimateInnovation 🌍⚡ #FutureOfFarming 🚜✨ #SustainableRobotics 🔋🌾 #FoundersInTheField 🚐🌽