Veldt: Robotic harvesting for specialty crops

Veldt builds robots that pick strawberries, tomatoes, peppers and other soft fruit grown under glass. Its vision models judge ripeness from several angles, and its grippers handle each fruit gently enough to avoid bruising. The machines work through the night, when labour is hardest to find, and a single robot picks around 1,200 strawberries an hour.

Maarten grew up on a greenhouse farm in the Westland, and Isla worked on robotic grasping at a university research group in Delft. We led the seed round in 2022 after a season-long pilot with two growers. Grant joined the board that year and works with the team on manufacturing and field operations.

Veldt now has 140 robots in commercial use across the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain, leased to growers at a fixed rate per kilogram picked.