Exclusive: Ag Drone Builder Guardian Agriculture Reaps $20 Million In New Funding

When asked how $20 million would help accelerate production of his company’s crop-spraying drones, Guardian Agriculture founder and CEO Adam Bercu wasted few words, declaring, in an exclusive interview, “This is the gas in the tank to go fuel that production.”

The Boston-area company announced Tuesday it had, indeed, scored $20 million in “gas” in the form of a Series A fundraising infusion from what Bercu described as “a wonderful syndicate of investors,” led by Fall Line Capital.

“Any farmer buying new machinery today can tell you about reliability problems as complexity has far outpaced quality control,” Fall Line Capital managing director Clay Mitchell said in a statement. “Guardian is the first company to develop unmanned aerial application technology that’s made with aviation-grade engineering and manufacturing, which greatly enhances reliability and performance.”

Founded in 2017, Guardian Agriculture produces the SC1 autonomous electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) drone, which farmers can use for aerial application of insecticides on their crops.

Each SC1 is 15 feet wide, weighs 600 pounds when fully loaded and is powered by a 100-pound battery pack. It carries 20 gallons of pesticide, which can cover 10 to 20 acres depending on the application rate and SC1’s speed, according to Bercu.

“So at the lower rates, two to three gallons per acre, you're getting something like 45 acres done in an hour, and at the high end of volume, 20 gallons per acre. It's closer to 20 acres per hour,” said Bercu, who explained, “This is all just putting the exact product on the right chunk of the acre at the right time to protect all the hard work of the farmers.”

The SC1 is designed to make flights of three to five minutes, then spending two to three minutes on the ground to both refill its tanks and recharge its high-density battery through a supercharger, a faster process than swapping out batteries, Bercu said.

Bercu notes while Guardian may produce efficient and effective drones it faces competition from myriad companies operating other types of crop-dusting machinery.

“Our competition is really everything—the whole gamut from existing small, largely Chinese automated drones, manned aviation, but most of the acres around the world are done with these extremely large heavy ground-based machines that really wreak havoc on the environment,” Bercu said.

The new cash coming just two months after Guardian won FAA approval to operate nationwide couldn't have come too soon.

“The money coming in is simply going towards our massive backlog of sales. We're projecting sales out to 2025, and it's difficult to sign people up when you have that far of a backlog,” said Bercu. “So we're investing heavily and rapidly and building up our manufacturing capacity at Boston. We've just doubled our footprint. We're pulling in machines, pulling in talent pulling in people.”

This summer, Guardian Agriculture will begin commercial operations to support customer Wilbur-Ellis, which operates the largest crop-dusting fleet in the U.S.

"Aerial crop protection systems have operated the same way for decades," Wilbur-Ellis vice president of supplier relations Willie Negroni said in a statement. "With the recent approval from the FAA, Guardian Agriculture is uniquely positioned to change the face of farming for the better. For the first time, we now have a reliable, cost-effective, and sustainable solution in the form of the Guardian SC1. We are so confident in the technology and the Guardian team that we are not only a customer, but also an investor."

Indeed, Guardian says it already has $100 million in customer orders.

The rationale for using autonomous drones covers safety, cost and a shortage of labor for doing things the old way.

Safety comes from two directions. First, by not having humans exposed to the strong chemicals, and second, better regulation of how much is applied to crops.

“These are very powerful products that all these agricultural producers sell. But you know, with great power comes great responsibility. It's not just the power of the chemistry, it's how you use it matters a lot to the operators. Simply having no one in the aircraft is just game changing, and having the machine make a lot of very quick game-time decisions is really key,” explained Bercu. “You can potentially contaminate the product, and too little is just as bad actually because that can breed resistance. Like taking half of your antibiotics.”

Those were points not lost on Guardian's new investors when making their decision to help finance the company's growth.

Bercu spent years working in his family's Miami-based aviation business, which exposed him to the dangers of crop dusting to those who applied the chemicals.

“Many of the pilots that we hired would go down to South America in the summertime and go and spray bananas and usually they would come back very happy making a lot of money doing a lot of real cowboy work,” he said, “and unfortunately not not all of them would come back.”

Using his experience and skills surrounding electric motors he developed winning multiple BattleBots competitions, Bercu founded Guardian Agriculture in 2017 in Woburn, Mass., later opening an additional office in California.

Now armed with new millions to fuel his company's expansion, Bercu is ready to take his drone company much further off the ground and poised to answer one big question: “Can we execute on this amazing opportunity we have? I really feel like we've caught a tiger by the tail here and it needs to go.”