Metafarmers (CEO Lee Kyu-hwa), an agricultural startup based on AI robot technology, announced on the 12th that it had attracted 3 billion won in pre-A series investment.
Octagon Venture Partners participated as the lead investor in this investment round, with Futureplay and Smilegate Investment listed as co-investors.
Metafarmers, founded by robotics experts from Seoul National University's IDIM Lab, is developing a multi-purpose agricultural robot called "OmniFarmer." OmniFarmer can handle a variety of agricultural tasks, including harvesting, pollination, sorting, and forecasting, all on a single platform. Using dedicated grippers and AI recognition technology, it is designed to adapt to a variety of agricultural environments, from traditional open-field farms to vertical farms and greenhouses.
The company's primary task is to address the shortage of rural labor due to the aging population, and aims to build a sustainable agricultural model where robots and people collaborate.
Based on this technology, Metafarmers has won several global awards, including the CES 2025 AgTech Innovation Award. Recently, the company received an AI-based growth prediction model from the Rural Development Administration, further enhancing its robot's crop assessment capabilities. Currently, it is preparing for full-scale commercialization through proof-of-concept (PoC) trials with agricultural cooperatives, large farms, and the Smart Farm Innovation Valley.
Lee Kyu-hwa, CEO of Metafarmers, said, “Through this investment, we plan to focus on advancing AI recognition technology and robot control technology, as well as preparing for commercialization,” adding, “In the long term, our goal is to contribute to solving structural problems in global agriculture beyond Korea.”
Nagi Moon, a partner at Octagon Venture Partners, said, “Metafarmers is a rare team developing physical AI technology that can be operated in actual agricultural fields,” and added, “General-purpose robot technology that can be applied to various environments is globally competitive and has the potential to shift the agricultural paradigm.”
“Agricultural sites are complex work environments with a variety of variables and communication environment constraints,” said Jeon A-ram, a senior analyst at Smilegate Investment, a new participant in this round. “MetaFarmers is overcoming these challenges with its own algorithms and hardware, and we highly value its high scalability and proprietary data pipeline.”
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