# Four Growers, Inc.

> Four Growers is a Pittsburgh robotics company building the GR-100, an autonomous robot that rolls down greenhouse rows, spots ripe tomatoes with stereo cameras and AI, and picks them without bruising the fruit or the plant. Founded by two University of Pittsburgh engineers, it sells to commercial greenhouse operators facing a deepening farm-labor shortage, and pairs the hardware with analytics that predict how much fruit is coming and where. It raised a $9M Series A in November 2024 and has robots running in the Netherlands and Canada.

- **Founded:** 2017
- **Headquarters:** Pittsburgh, United States
- **Founders:** Brandon Contino (CEO and Co-Founder), Dan Chi (CTO and Co-Founder)
- **Team size:** ~31 employees
- **Products:** GR-100 Harvesting Robot, Weighted Packing Cart, Yield Heatmaps & Forecasting
- **Notable:** Built and deployed the GR-100, an autonomous tomato-harvesting robot running commercially in the Netherlands and Canada, Robots have harvested millions of tomatoes to date, Raised $9M Series A in November 2024 (about $17.3M total)

## Products & services

- **GR-100 Harvesting Robot** — Autonomous greenhouse robot that uses stereo cameras and AI perception to detect ripe tomatoes, plan a collision-free path, and pick them with a vacuum-style gripper without damaging fruit or plant. Runs 24/7 at ~43 kg/hr with ~98% ripeness accuracy, with minimal facility modifications.
- **Weighted Packing Cart** — Patented elevator packing-cart system that receives harvested fruit and handles logistics on the row, carrying roughly 24 crates / 246 kg per session so the picking arm never stops for handling.
- **Yield Heatmaps & Forecasting** — Analytics generated from each harvest run: yield heatmaps down to 3-meter greenhouse zones and forecasts of ripening fruit for upcoming weeks, plus a remote dashboard for monitoring multiple units.

## Achievements

- Built and deployed the GR-100, an autonomous tomato-harvesting robot running commercially in the Netherlands and Canada
- Robots have harvested millions of tomatoes to date
- Raised $9M Series A in November 2024 (about $17.3M total)
- Patented weighted elevator packing-cart system and proprietary perception/motion-planning algorithms
- Reports motion planning ~34x faster than standard algorithms and picking ~5x faster than competing solutions

## Latest updates

- **2024-11** — Closed a $9M Series A led by Bassett Capital with Ospraie Ag Science and Y Combinator, to scale GR-100 production and expand in Europe, North America and Oceania.
- **2024-11** — CEO Brandon Contino said the company is branching beyond cherry tomatoes toward cucumbers and peppers via swappable grippers.

## Links

- Website: https://fourgrowers.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/four-growers-inc
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/FourGrowers
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/FourGrowers

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/four-growers-inc
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-08-20