FoA 419: Laser Weeding And Growing A Robotics Company Toward An IPO With Paul Mikesell of Carbon Robotics

Future of Agriculture

Headstorm: https://headstorm.com/

AGPILOT: https://headstorm.com/agpilot/

Carbon Robotics: https://carbonrobotics.com/

Paul is the founder and CEO of Carbon Robotics. What Carbon Robotics is doing is novel and interesting in and of itself, and we’re going to talk a lot about that in today’s episode. But it’s important to note that Paul has a really impressive history of building technology companies outside of agriculture.

Before starting Carbon Robotics, he co-founded Isilon Systems, a distributed storage company, in 2001. Isilon went public in 2006 and was acquired by EMC for $2.5 billion in 2010. In 2006, Paul co-founded Clustrix, a distributed database startup that was acquired by MariaDB in 2018. Immediately before Carbon, Paul served as Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Uber, where he grew the team and opened the company’s engineering office in Seattle, later focusing on deep learning and computer vision.

So in today’s episode we’re going to talk a lot about laser weeding, building a field robotics company, Paul’s views on artificial intelligence and where he sees applications for the tech in agriculture, and the challenges an opportunities ahead for carbon robotics and agtech in general.

I’ll drop you into the conversation where Paul is explaining his desire to jump from tech to agtech, and how that transition has been for him.