Mushroom farmers are locked in a constant chess game ─ ensuring they harvest the popular fungi at the right moment of its growth cycle and not long after, as to prevent mushrooms from crowding out one another for resources and thus reducing yields. Enter 4AG Robotics and its automated harvesting technology as a potential checkmate to the mushroom-growing game.
Based in Salmon Arm, British Columbia, 4AG Robotics is the maker of automated mushroom harvesting robots that use AI and “computer vision to detect everything on beds to understand the size and growth rate of each mushroom,” and suction grippers to pluck mushrooms at just the right moment, Sean O’Connor, CEO of 4AG Robotics, told AgTechNavigator.
Knowing exactly when to harvest a mushroom can be a difficult process, since the fungus typically grows 4% in size per hour, and manual harvesting can be inefficient and costly, he explained.
“You have ... to pick mushrooms at exactly the right time to get the most amount of weight or revenue from that bed. If you pick a mushroom at four o’clock in the afternoon, but the right time to pick it is four o’clock the next morning, that is 12 hours of growing. So, 48% more growth or revenue that you could get out of that mushroom by picking at the right time. But if you pick it too late, they will start to bump into the other mushrooms. They will become misshapen and will compete for nutrients,” O’Connor said.
He added, “You have this constant challenge of mushroom chess in terms of when you decide to pick each mushroom to optimize for the best quality and yield.”
Scaling with the help of Series B funding
4AG announced that it raised $40 million CAD to scale up its automation business in a round led by Astanor and Cibus Capital and participation from BDC Industrial Innovation Fund, Emmertech, InBC, Jim Richardson Family Office, Stray Dog Capital, and Voyager Capital. This round follows $17.5 million CAD in funding raised in 2023.
Instead of opening up vertical mushroom farms, 4AG is partnering with mushroom growers globally and currently has robots operational in Canada, Australia, and Ireland, with a Netherlands customer set to go live next year, he said. Growers pay an upfront cost and then pay a recurring revenue fee for the robots, he added.
“The mushroom industry is well established, run by great operators who really know how to grow mushrooms in a way that is super environmentally friendly and produces quality, highly nutritious food. And so, we wanted to create a solution that did not mess with any of that, so it needed to retrofit easily onto existing farms. And so that is what our robots do today. We just sell robots to the farms,” he elaborated.
With the Series B funding and several commercial wins, 4AG is projecting profitability in the next 12-24 months, O’Connor said. Additionally, shoppers are purchasing more mushrooms, pressuring growers to find innovative growing and harvesting solutions, at a time that the world is looking for more climate-resilient crops, he added.
“You have this constant challenge of mushroom chess in terms of when you decide to pick each mushroom to optimize for the best quality and yield.”
Sean O’Connor, CEO of 4AG Robotics
The root vegetables and mushrooms market reached $127.78 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow by a 7.41% CAGR between 2025 and 2030, with the bulk of revenue coming from China, according to Statista data.
“As climate change starts to set in, which unfortunately we are seeing more and more of that, mushrooms will continue being efficiently grown and have a high predictability because they are grown indoors and in a controlled agricultural environment. So, the crop itself is wonderful as it is good for you, good for the environment, and adaptable to a changing environment. And so I think we are going to see just more and more growth in this space for the product, for the crop itself, ... and therefore more farms needing robots.”
