Burro, formerly known as Augean Robotics, is a US-based company founded by Charlie Andersen that builds autonomous ground robots designed to work alongside people in agriculture and other labor-intensive outdoor settings. The name and concept evoke a tireless pack animal: a robot that carries loads, follows workers and moves materials so humans can focus on skilled tasks rather than hauling.
The company's core product is a rugged wheeled robot that uses vision-based autonomy to navigate fields, vineyards, orchards and nurseries. It can operate in a 'follow-me' mode, trailing a worker and carrying harvested produce, or run autonomous point-to-point routes it has learned, ferrying crops from pickers to packing stations. Crucially, Burro navigates using onboard perception rather than buried wires, beacons or other costly infrastructure, making it practical to deploy on working farms.
Burro's value proposition is rooted in agriculture's chronic and worsening labor shortage. Tasks like carrying full harvest bins are physically exhausting and consume a large share of expensive labor hours. By offloading transport and other repetitive jobs to robots, growers can boost the productivity of the workers they do have and reduce dependence on a shrinking seasonal workforce. The platform has expanded from a 'people scale' helper toward larger 'pallet scale' autonomous haulers, with products like the larger Burro Grande broadening payload capacity.
Burro has built a real commercial footprint, deploying robots across specialty crop operations and growing through a dealer network. In January 2024 it raised a $24 million Series B led by Catalyst Investors and Translink Capital, with participation from S2G Ventures, Toyota Ventures, F-Prime Capital and Cibus Capital. The funding supports scaling production, expanding its dealer-led distribution and launching new products as Burro works to become a general-purpose autonomous platform for outdoor labor.