The harvest doesn't wait for labour
In Marathwada, soybean is cut by hand in a window of about ten days before the pods shatter. There are fewer farm workers every year, and the ones left have other options, so at harvest the cutters often arrive a week late, and they set the price. Farmers wait, lose pods, and this year some ploughed the crop under.
Rented reapers remove the hard work but not the dependence: they need a skilled operator, who is scarce in the same window, and they cut at a fixed height, so short and fallen plants are missed.
- ₹3,500–5,500
- per acre to cut soybean by hand, 2026, Latur district
- 7–10 days
- the harvest window before pods shatter
- 6–8 days late
- how long farmers told us they typically wait for cutters
What we're building
A compact field robot sized for small, irregular, intercropped plots. It drives itself along the rows, cuts at the right height for each crop, and runs long hours, including the cool early morning when pods shatter least. One village operator books the jobs and looks after several machines.
The farmer pays about ₹3,000 an acre, less than hand labour, and the machine shows up on the day it's booked. The same base takes a seed drill and an inter-row weeder, so it works more days a year than a harvester alone.
Where we are
Pre-revenue, pre-hardware, and honest about it. The simulation works: the rover finds the rows with its camera, steers down the gap, recovers when it's knocked off line, and stops at the end of the row.
Gazebo simulation, October 2026. The rover model carries a camera, IMU, GPS and LiDAR; row detection is colour-based, which works on green plants and will need a trained model for brown harvest-ready crop.
- 30+ farmer interviews across 5 villages in Latur district, with per-acre cost data
- Working simulation: row detection, steering, recovery, stop at row end
- Physical rover: parts [ordered DATE], assembly in Bangalore
- First paid acres with an operated reaper, February 2027 chickpea harvest
- Rover on real rows, then autonomy on the reaper
Who's building it
Avinash Shinde, founder. Grew up in Latur; the family farm is 40 km away and his mother farms it today. Nine years of software close to hardware: printer R&D at HP, then four years at Esper building fleet management and real-time remote control for about a million Android and Linux devices, including robots on Jetson. Based in Bangalore, moving to Pune to be four hours from the fields.