The founders of Upside Robotics met in 2023 because they were both looking to build an impact-driven company that touched climate and agriculture. Less than a year later, they were sleeping in a camper on the side of a Canadian corn field building their robotics startup.
Waterloo, Ontario-based Upside Robotics builds lightweight solar-powered autonomous robots that deliver right-sized amounts of fertilizer and nutrients to crops when they need it. The company’s software runs on proprietary algorithms to decipher when and how much fertilizer the plants need using weather and soil data.
Upside’s robots currently work on corn plants — one of the most fertilizer-intensive crops — which was chosen by Upside for that exact reason, Jana Tian, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
After Tian and Sam Dugan, co-founder and chief technology officer, met at the Entrepreneurs First accelerator, they decided to focus on reducing fertilizer waste using robots because it fit squarely into the center of the Venn diagram of their interests. It also leaned well toward their backgrounds.
Dugan had been building robots since he was 10 years old and Tian had years of experience as a chemical engineer in the food division at Unilever.
Customer discovery with farmers further confirmed this was an area farmers were willing to pay for a better way.
“Traditionally, the way the fertilizer has been applied, only 30% of the total fertilizer gets taken by the crop, so a majority of it gets wasted,” Tian said. “Farmers usually do one application per season, so they have to front-load a lot of the fertilizer. But the crops need the fertilizer during the season as well. We knew there was that problem that a lot of our growers really wanted different solutions to.”
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Tian and DuganImage Credits:Courtesy of Upside Robotics
The pair formally founded Upside Robotics in 2024 and then hit the fields — literally.
“We actually bought a camper trailer, and we moved around field to field,” Dugan said. “We stayed on the side of the field every night, and we would be walking, sometimes around the clock. We have spent every hour of the day in a corn field at some point in time.”
Dugan built a robot in two weeks so they could start to test their idea. This device was a remote-controlled car that Dugan and Tian would operate manually. They’d follow the robot around the fields to collect data and demonstrate how the fertilizing system would work to farmers.
“We did our manual applications in year one, and that allowed us to iterate super fast, not just kind of on the hardware side, but learning by being with the farmers,” Tian said. “Some of our farmers said that we spent probably more time than they did in a lifetime in their fields. That allowed us to wrap up quickly. Neither of us were farmers, so that gave us firsthand experience into what it is like to basically be a farmer.”
After spending the 2024 season proving the company’s concept, they spent that off-season developing the fourth generation of their robot for the 2025 growing season. They went from 70 acres in 2024 to 1,200 acres in 2025.
Now, the company is gearing up to serve more than 3,000 acres in the upcoming 2026 season with 100% customer retention since the beginning. Upside reported that it has thus far helped its customers cut fertilizer use by 70%, which equates to around $150 in savings per acre per season.
Upside recently raised a $7.5 million seed round led by Plural with participation from Garage Capital and the founders of Clearpath Robotics.
The funding will be used to continue to fund research and development and to keep up with demand — there are more than 200 farms on their waitlist. The company also hopes to expand out of Canada with a target of breaking into the U.S. corn belt.
“People always question if farmers are going to adopt new solutions, and they certainly are, and that’s something that we’ve learned firsthand, as long as you can provide them with a clear [return on investment] and a clear reason of why this technology was built,” Tian said. “In our case, it wasn’t something that we actually had to sell to farmers. In a lot of cases, our farmers actually asked for this solution.”
