Wootzano: https://www.wootzano.com/

Atif Syed on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/syedatif/

Via Atif's LinkedIn post

"I never thought I’d have to write this.

Wootzano, the British robotics company I built from nothing, is at risk of being shut down not because of commercial failure, but because of a procedural trap.

Yesterday, after a petition by Innovate UK Loans Limited (UKRI), the Court issued an order that instantly froze Wootzano’s bank accounts.

That created an impossible situation:

In Scotland, a company cannot speak in court without a solicitor.

A solicitor must lodge our appeal.

But with accounts frozen, we cannot pay a solicitor."

And if we don’t file the appeal by 28 November, liquidation becomes final.

A functioning deep-tech company can be silenced without ever being heard.

This is not how innovation should die.

Wootzano took an £838k Innovate UK Innovation Loan, a government lender, in 2022, a product marketed as patient, flexible capital for high-growth innovators. Flexibility is even built into the contract.

But when our funded subsystem didn’t reach commercialisation, no flexibility was offered, and the matter went straight down the standard debt route.

If this can happen to us, it can happen to any of the 240+ UK companies on this loan programme.

Wootzano is:

🇬🇧 The only British ag-robotics company for post-harvest to ship commercial robots to Japan and various other countries

🤖 Active in 6 countries

🔧 Supporting UK engineers, suppliers, and farmers

📈 Delivering £537m+ worth of contracts

🌍 Representing Britain on global trade missions

💡 Backed by diverse shareholders, from farmers to technologists, who believed the UK could lead in robotics

Losing this to a procedural freeze, not a business failure, will destroy trust in British deep-tech nationally and internationally.

We need to get a solicitor initially to file the appeal before the deadline.

Appeal deadline: 28 November

Every hour matters

Even a share of this post helps.

I have spent years building this with an extraordinary team.

I am not giving up, but right now, the company is legally unable to act without help.

If you believe in fairness, due process, and protecting UK innovation, please support or share this widely.

AquaSpy: https://aquaspy.com/

On the show today is Bruce Moeller, before buying AquaSpy in 2009 Bruce was already a serial entrepreneur, a former president of a publicly traded company, and an author of two books. He successfully grew and exited Culture Works and Drive Cam, which was an early dash cam company. He decided to apply the idea they used at Drive Cam to use technology to capture what hadn’t been easily recorded previously, to agriculture. Specifically in-situ monitoring of soil conditions around a plant’s roots.

So Bruce and his team bought AquaSpy, a company out of Adelaide, Australia in 2009, so really early in this part of agtech, and they’ve been operating it ever since. Bruce is not from an ag background, but as you’ll hear he looked at this as more of a feature than a bug.

To describe AquaSpy, Bruce uses the analogy of the ecosystem of the rhizosphere, this area of soil around the roots of having it’s own weather. And AquaSpy being a tool to check the weather down there, which has all sorts of applications, especially with their latest feature, which allows them to also measure in-situ nitrogen in real time.

We talk about how AquaSpy is approaching their technology and the problems it solves for farmers, and we talk about how AI is enabling them to move in a more predictive direction with the data they’re collecting.

Five Questions About The Ag Robotics Revolution (FIRA 2024 Reflections)

The Next Great Ag Equipment Brand will be Autonomy-First with Charlie Andersen of Burro

Autonomous Sprayers with Gary Thompson of GUSS

Making Spot Spray Technology Accessible With Jaisimha Rao of Niqo Robotics

The Path To Superhuman Farming with Curtis Garner and Brent Shedd of Verdant Robotics

Category Design with Dan Schultz

THE BIG REGRESSION (by Jason Fried on X)

I attended FIRA USA a few months ago, which is a great event focused on agricultural robots and autonomous solutions. Like I did last year, I wanted to share some reflections on the current state of the ag robotics sector.

Today you'll hear from AgTonomy CEO Tim Bucher and Ecorobotix CEO Dominique Mégret on today’s episode about how autonomy in agriculture is much more than a way to reduce labor needs. It’s about re-thinking what it means to farm better.

And while these solutions are finding their footing, we’re still a long way from widespread adoption. We talk about both the opportunities and the challenges of ag robotics and automation on this episode!