Reservoir Opening Farm Robotics Incubators
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
There are over 7,000 startup incubators around the world, yet there isn’t a single one that combines a robotic shop with a farm, until now. CEO and managing partner at Reservoir, Danny Berstein, says coming in the first quarter of 2025, they’re forming a nonprofit robotic incubator to help speed up innovation and mechanization among specialty crops. The first locations will be in Merced and the Salinas Valley.
Bernstein… “We will have at any given moment, a dozen or so startups and residents. And they will actually pay like a membership fee basically to be there and we won't exclude if a startup wants to be there and they have a viable project and they can pay their rent, let's say, then we will accept them. We will also incubate certain projects ourselves, maybe with a grower and do that in a kind of an efficient way. We'll do some studio work and then we also see a very strong use case for international companies. So I spoke to one Istanbul-based startup today and he said to me, Can we have our headquarters be at Reservoir Farms because we're focused on specialty crops is that sure it's going to be way more capital efficient for him to do that versus have to find his own shop, find his own farm, find his own storage and all those things. And so we've come to call this the olympic village of ag tech because we think that there will be quite a few international companies that actually want to leverage this for infrastructure. And so the model is much more of an incubator than it is an accelerator.”
Bernstein says it’s being pursued in conjunction with community organizations and community colleges.
