Le 01/12/2025
4AG Robotics Wins 2025 FIRA Start-up of the Year
Each year, FIRA awards its Start-up of the Year, Investors’ Choice Award to an agricultural robotics company with exceptional promise. Judges look for a company capable of advancing the broader agricultural robotics ecosystem while delivering real-world value to growers. Start-ups are scored on market opportunity, business model, a unique selling proposition, management team, presentation and impact on ESG.
The 2025 winner, 4AG Robotics, stood out in a highly competitive field for their innovative approach to robotic mushroom harvesting. 4AG impressed the judges with its approach, leadership team and commercial traction. Mushroom growers on three continents are already using its technology
To learn more about 4AG’s progress, priorities and vision for the future, GOFAR spoke with Sean O’Connor, CEO of 4AG Robotics.
GOFAR: What does this award mean for 4AG Robotics?
Sean O'Connor: It’s a huge honour, but more than anything it’s validation that the world’s top agricultural robotics experts see real, lasting impact in what we’re building. Though we don’t build our company around trophies (awards don’t harvest mushrooms, robots do), this award is special because it reflects the hard work of our team and the incredible progress of the industry. Farms only buy more robots if they work.
GOFAR: What are the top three priorities for 4AG in the next 12–18 months?
#1 Scale deployments globally.
We’re moving from pilot programmes to multi-farm, multi-country rollouts. Our focus is on ensuring our robots run 24/7 and deliver consistent, measurable labour savings and yield improvements.
#2 Advance the product roadmap.
Over the next 12–18 months, we need to evolve from a labour replacement solution to a revenue optimisation solution. The data and insights we derive from performing our primary task (mushroom harvesting) are immensely valuable in helping optimise the growing rooms to produce the most amount of food possible.
#3 Eliminate a third priority.
We’re constantly asked if we will prioritise other crops or new farm growing types. But if we want to succeed, we need to stay relentlessly focused on scaling our deployments and ensuring our robots maxmise yield at the highest quality for our farms.
GOFAR: In five years, how will 4AG have changed the mushroom industry and agriculture broadly?
Mushroom growing will become a 24-hour, fully automated harvesting environment. Labour bottlenecks, which have been the industry’s biggest constraint for decades, will be gone. Farms will expand capacity without needing to find more people. Quality, consistency and yields will increase because robots can follow ideal picking behaviour all day long.
Mushroom farms that choose automation will instantly replace 30–50% of their total costs with robots and gain a competitive advantage that changes their position on a global scale.
More broadly, agriculture will shift from “robots as a novelty” to “robots as critical infrastructure.”
GOFAR: What’s the most exciting part of your technology that people might miss?
Most people see the arm picking mushrooms, which is super cool, but the real magic is in the AI. Mushrooms grow fast (4% an hour!), unpredictably and in dense clusters. Our robots detect quality, maturity and pickability in real time, making hundreds of micro-decisions per minute. It’s that intelligence, not just the mechanics, that makes true commercial harvesting automation possible.
GOFAR: What market signal made you realise, “We’re onto something big”?
Earlier this year, we started to receive our first expansion orders. This was an important inflection point for the company because it proved the value of our technology to growers. What starts as a pilot programme can evolve into an operational change from human labour to robots.
We’re still early in this journey, but having customers pay to expand their fleets was a critical moment for the company. The demand is no longer “can you prove it works?” It’s “how fast can you scale?”
GOFAR: How do you measure success beyond sales or funding?
The most important thing that we need to do as a company is to prove that every week a mushroom farm will receive the same or more revenue from the rooms with robots harvesting than the rooms with people harvesting. It’s a perfect A/B test because the rooms have the same conditions, were filled on the same date and should theoretically produce the same results.
These side-by-side comparisons prove AI is more capable than human beings at deciding when a mushroom is ready to pick. In other words, it’s reached maximum size while still retaining the quality and product desirability for the farm's retail customers.
GOFAR: What’s a myth or misunderstanding about agricultural robotics you wish would disappear?
The idea that a robotic solution that’s 95% done only has another 5% of their journey remaining. A robotic solution that’s 95% completed is likely only about 50% ready to be a viable product that works in the real world. That last 5% is an immense mountain to climb, and takes a lot of time and money to complete.
GOFAR: Any words of wisdom for other ag-tech start-ups?
Solve the farmer’s biggest problem. They’re too busy to buy products that solve their 7th biggest problem.
See 4AG Robotics’ Mushroom Picking Robot in Action
VIDEO Forager HX400 - Robots Picking, Trimming and Packing Mushrooms into Bulk Boxes