Korean AI robotics startup MetaFarmers has secured approximately USD 2.3 million(KRW 3 billion) in Pre-Series A funding. The round was led by Octagon Venture Partners, with participation from FuturePlay and Smilegate Investment.

Founded by robotics experts from Seoul National University’s IDIM Lab, MetaFarmers is developing the “Omni Farmer,” a multi-purpose agricultural robot with the vision of creating “a future where robots and humans farm together,” amid worsening labor shortages in rural areas due to aging populations. The Omni Farmer performs diverse agricultural tasks—including harvesting, pollination, sorting, and monitoring—on a single platform. Equipped with interchangeable grippers and crop-recognition AI technology, it is applicable to traditional farms, vertical farms, and greenhouses. Its ability to handle multiple tasks with one robot offers clear technological differentiation and competitive advantage.

Thanks to its capabilities, MetaFarmers has won several global awards, including the CES 2025 AgTech Innovation Award. Recently, it enhanced its performance by adopting an AI-based growth prediction model from the Rural Development Administration. The company is currently conducting PoC projects with the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation, large-scale farms, and Smart Farm Innovation Valleys, preparing for full market entry.

Nagi Moon, Partner at Octagon Venture Partners—who invested in both the seed and Pre-A rounds—stated, “MetaFarmers is a rare team developing agricultural Physical AI that works in real-world farming environments. Their universal robotics technology, adaptable to diverse conditions, has strong global competitiveness and the potential to address rural labor shortages while transforming agricultural paradigms.”

Ahram Jeon, Senior Investment Manager at FuturePlay, commented, “Agricultural environments involve numerous variables depending on crop and task types, and all these must be processed through edge computing in poor communication environments—making the task highly challenging. MetaFarmers has built proprietary algorithms and grippers to develop a data accumulation pipeline tailored to agricultural settings. Based on this, their scalability in crop and task coverage is exceptionally high, which led us to invest.”

MetaFarmers CEO Kyu-Hwa Lee said, “We aim to contribute to solving fundamental problems faced by global agriculture, not just in Korea. Our goal is to develop sustainable and practical robotic solutions to address agricultural labor challenges. This investment will accelerate the enhancement of our AI perception and robotic control technologies, as well as our commercialization readiness, expediting our path to market.”