Founder @TRICRobotics 🚜 | We're replacing chemical pesticides with UV light + autonomous robots 🌱 | PhD Robotics | Building robots that do physical work
Santa Barbara, CA
Joined May 2013
- Tweets98
- Following30
- Followers350
- Likes203
Adam Stager retweeted
While the farm sleeps, we go to work.
TRIC robots autonomously move through commercial strawberry fields at night, delivering UV-C and Bug Vacs to help growers manage pests and disease.
The future of pest management works after dark.
Adam Stager retweeted
Two robots. One field. Zero drama.
Safe path planning and autonomous coordination keep operations moving, even when robots meet in the middle of the job.
That's autonomy built for agriculture.
#TRICRobotics #AgTech #Autonom
Thanks for sharing @RomanAKozak, it was awesome sharing agtech stories and having you out in the field to see our operations this week. Excited to see the continued growth at @IrrigationAI and looking forward to catching you in the field again sometime soon.
Luna isn’t just reducing chemical pesticides with UV light. If you look closely you can see how our bug vacuums suck up the pests that we don’t treat with light.
By innovating on well know tech, we increased its effectiveness by more than 2x!
Adam Stager retweeted
While most of us are sleeping...
Thousands of strawberry plants are getting treated.
Every.
Single.
Night.
Why do our robots run at night?
We get this question all the time and it's not just because it looks really cool.
Why do our robots work at night?
Simple: nature gives us an advantage.
Our UV-C light neutralizes fungi, bacteria, and insect eggs. During the day, UV-A light from the sun can help these pests repair from it. At night, they can't, so our treatments are far more effective.
Also at night, insect pests have also settled into the plants to rest, where our Bug-Vacs, with 2× the suction power of traditional bug vacs, can remove them more effectively. Oh, and the bees go home to their hives at night, so they're not inadvertently removed when we operate.
Lastly, farmers days are busy enough, so we can operate when they sleep, out of the way of their harvesting and other daytime activities in the field.
That's why our robots go to work after the sun goes down.
Amazing to see this go from an idea to commercial-scale fields. Now robots operate every night along California's Central Coast. We are just getting started!
Excited to have so many people following along here on X!!
A lot of you are new here.
Welcome to TRIC Robotics.
We build autonomous robots that work overnight in commercial strawberry fields, helping growers manage pests with less chemicals while reducing their input and labor costs, improving their production and profitability.
Everything you see here is happening on real farms today.
Thanks for following along.
We've got a lot more to share.
#AgTech
Adam Stager retweeted
A lot of you are new here.
Welcome to TRIC Robotics.
We build autonomous robots that work overnight in commercial strawberry fields, helping growers manage pests with less chemicals while reducing their input and labor costs, improving their production and profitability.
Everything you see here is happening on real farms today.
Thanks for following along.
We've got a lot more to share.
#AgTech
Entertaining summary of our work using UV light on farms to control pests and disease at @tricrobotics
TRIC raised $5.5M in 2025 to help shape the next generation of farming. Quite literally, and figuratively, working out in Left Field with the farmers who need it most.
leftfield.beehiiv.com/p/issu…
It's amazing to see how building as a community can help accelerate growth. @reservoirfarms is one of the rare places where agtech startups can come together on real farms. DM me or @bernsteind if you want to hear more about it!
on friday @ReservoirFarms had 100 followers. @TRICRobotics had 300.
4 million views and 48 hours later, both accounts 30x’d.
turns out the world is very ready for real robots on real farms.
technology as resilience.
We started @tricrobotics to help farmers grow healthier, more sustainable food for everyone. In just a few years, we’ve gone from early pilots to a fleet of tractor-scale robots using UV light and bug vacuums on some of the largest strawberry farms in California.
We've treated tens of thousands of acres and we’re doubling our fleet every year. Every machine means less reliance on chemical pesticides, better tools for growers, and a more resilient food system for everyone.
It’s not just about the robots. It also takes a great team. Reach out if you want to help us build the future of agriculture!
autonomous robot driving through the field at night. no chemicals. no pesticides. just UV light killing pathogens and pests while everyone sleeps. this is @tricrobotics.
this is what chemical-free pest control looks like at scale.
Great to see leaders like @nayibbukele focused on building a better future for everyone through innovation.
At @tricrobotics we are bringing technologies like UV light and bug vacuums to farms so farmers have more effective tools to grow our food.
The key to saving the environment is not looking backward, it’s moving forward.
I realized this the first time I visited Italy twenty years ago. Everything was clean and green. The rivers sparkled. The lesson for me was obvious: the answer is not underdevelopment. The answer is progress.
When China was poor, the air was so polluted that people could barely see the blue sky. Today, blue skies have returned to their cities. Development does not only create wealth, it also provides the resources needed to restore and protect the environment.
Some environmentalists want us to preserve every aspect of our biodiversity, including the mosquitoes for example, so that researchers can fly in once every ten years from their universities (which build particle accelerators and billion-dollar laboratories with their pocket money), study our ecosystems, and count how many people died from dengue outbreaks.
They want to buy our air through carbon credits. If carbon credits were such a great deal, they would be selling them to us, not the other way around.
Cleaning every river, lake, and water source in El Salvador, and ensuring they remain clean and sparkling, would cost roughly $12 billion. Where is that money supposed to come from without economic development? Carbon credits?
The path forward for our country is the path of Japan and Singapore, not the path of the Congo.
Adam Stager retweeted
autonomous robot driving through the field at night. no chemicals. no pesticides. just UV light killing pathogens and pests while everyone sleeps. this is @tricrobotics.
this is what chemical-free pest control looks like at scale.
Adam Stager retweeted
Excited to share that we've closed two new funds at @VersionOneVC: Fund V ($78M) and Opportunities Fund III ($30M).
Our focus remains the same — backing exceptional founders early, often before a category is obvious or crowded.
We're investing globally at pre-seed/seed across AI, robotics, deep tech, biology, decentralized systems, and emerging ecosystems like India and Africa.
The founders we're most drawn to aren't chasing trends — they're mission-driven people with unusual insight solving problems they understand intimately.
Many of the most important companies of the next decade will initially look misunderstood or too early. That's where we want to be.
Thank you to our LPs and community for their continued support. And above all, to the founders who give us the opportunity to be part of their journeys.
Adam Stager retweeted
🎉 Today, we're excited to share that we've closed two new funds: @VersionOneVC Fund V ($78M) and Opportunities Fund III ($30M). 🎉
More + link to blog post in thread below...
🤖 Made with AI
Getting ready to assemble the next set of robots! Freshly galvanized parts look almost as cool as the finished machines.
Adam Stager retweeted
Taken Sep 1, 2016 when @JonathanRoss321 convinced me we could take on the giants, build new silicon and that AI was coming. In typical SV fashion, we didn’t even have a company yet - just a term sheet from me to invest and the three of us. I spent the next month recruiting as many of the TPU team from Google Wisconsin as I could. “Welcome to chips”, I thought.
The company, as with all important companies, went through its own trials and tribulations including promoting Jonathan from CTO to CEO and the inevitable falling out and repair of his and my relationship. Anyways, it all happened for a reason.
Today we close this almost decade chapter and Jonathan starts a new one with nVidia.
I can’t thank him enough.
Sometimes it’s simply better to be lucky than good and be fortunate enough to work with great people and follow them into battle. That is me here.
Jonathan was not only the father of TPU when he was at Google but he is a technical genius of biblical proportions. He also assembled a great team with folks like @sundeep and @GavinSherry to back him up. They will also do incredible things at nvidia.
Separately, whenever something I’m involved in either crashes or wins, I reread my thoughts when I first did it. Was it luck? Was it skill? What did I learn? What do I do now?
YMMV, but I am attaching the original investment memo I wrote a decade ago.
I’ll do a more substantive view on why this deal matters and what my guess is about the future of AI silicon from here on an upcoming episode of the pod.
In the meantime, Merry Christmas. I am very thankful. So thank you Jonathan, Sunny, Gavin and the entire Groq team. 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽
Adam Stager retweeted
Announcing @VersionOneVC's 1st investment in AgTech, @tricrobotics!
TRIC makes giant farming robots that use UV light to replace chemical pesticides & automate pest and disease control for strawberry farmers (its initial market).
Incredible excited to partner w/ @adamstager!
