Brandon Contino arrived at the University of Pittsburgh already planning to be an innovator.
He enrolled as an undergraduate in the Swanson School of Engineering, intending to explore neural engineering — designing systems that translate brain signals into action for people with impaired motor function, such as controlling robotic limbs. He envisioned pursuing a doctorate in the field.
But his experiences during those four years, including immersion in programming at the Big Idea Center for student innovation, pushed him to the next step: becoming an entrepreneur.
Today, he is CEO of Four Growers, the company he co-founded in 2018 with his classmate, Dan Chi, that applies AI computer vision to harvest tomatoes in commercial greenhouses. Controlled by a sophisticated “AI harvesting brain,” these machines identify, evaluate, and pick produce with a precision that was once thought impossible for automation. The company is poised to continue growing by expanding the types of produce its robots harvest and by moving beyond greenhouses to traditional orchards and farms.
“Wherever the sun is shining around the world, our robots are at work,” Contino said.
Based in Pittsburgh’s Point Breeze neighborhood, Four Growers has scaled rapidly to a team of over 30 engineers and specialists. While the company is now a global player in the agricultural technology sector, its foundation was built through a rigorous “innovation-first” R&D phase at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering and the Big Idea Center.
Pivot, Learn, Repeat
Contino’s first exposure to the ideas and mindset of entrepreneurship came in a class called “Social Entrepreneurship,” where he first encountered the Business Model Canvas. This business planning tool condenses a business idea into a single-page diagram consisting of nine building blocks, beginning with customer segmentation and defining how to create value for those customers.
His first crack at product development came the summer after his junior year, when he wrote grants to build water-quality sensors. He met Chi in the lab they shared with associate professor David Sanchez, the associate director of the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation. Chi was working on a different project involving hydroponic agriculture.
Together, they decided to put their ideas to the test by entering the Big Idea Competition hosted by the Big Idea Center (part of the Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship) with an idea centered on water-efficient vertical farming. They didn’t win a prize, but they were hooked on the thrill of finding a strong product-market fit.
“We became less enamored with vertical farming. The business case didn’t make sense at scale, just the economics of the high cost of production for a limited market size that would pay the high produce prices for a small margin product,” he said.
Their customer discovery efforts around vertical farming exposed them to commercial greenhouse farming, which appealed to them with its water-efficient methods. But they pivoted their value proposition from water to labor, which was a bigger problem for greenhouse operators.
With their new idea for a robotic greenhouse harvesting, they re-entered the Big Idea Competition, and this time they won the $25,000 top prize. And, that win set off a chain reaction of high-profile opportunities. They were then accepted into the ACC Inventure Prize competition and the prestigious Rice Business Plan Competition, which occurred concurrently in 2018, forcing Contino to pitch in Atlanta for the ACC competition while Chi flew to Houston for the Rice competition.
They took second place at the ACC competition, becoming the first Pitt team to win a prize in that competition.
“It was pretty crazy, but it was a lot of fun,” he said of that time. “It was nice to get some affirmation for our idea, and some non-dilutive money we could use to see if it could actually work.”
They used the money to buy shop vacs and began developing a prototype. They also made connections to the local “maker” community. Local robotics firm HEBI Robotics loaned them a robotic arm to conduct their initial experiments.
“We were receiving a lot of great advice and encouragement from the Big Idea Center,” he said. “The Big Idea Center is very accessible and welcoming. It’s a great environment for students who have ideas and want to learn how to execute those ideas. You don’t need to have everything figured out. You just need to have the initiative and want to try new things,” he said.
As Chi was about to graduate, a tipping point came when they were accepted into the Y Combinator (YC), a renowned Silicon Valley startup incubator that currently invests $500,000 into promising startups in return for a seven percent equity stake. They experienced an intensive three-month mentoring and networking program.
“When we were accepted into YC, it changed our trajectory and allowed us to begin growing the team and moving faster toward our goals,” he said.
Operating Globally, Rooted in Pittsburgh
Both Contino and Chi had experience growing organizations while at Pitt. Contino helped grow the Robotics Automation Society, from a handful of students to more than 60.
Now they are growing Four Growers in Pittsburgh. Contino, a native of Denver, said they chose to stay in Pittsburgh because of its concentrated talent in AI and robotics, as well as its proximity to commercial greenhouses, which are concentrated in the northeast U.S.
Even as the company remains based in Pittsburgh, it is expanding its operations internationally in Europe and Australia and looks to expand the types of crops that it harvests.
“Some of the crops being grown more in greenhouses include tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers. Strawberries are becoming more common. Even lettuce,” he said.
What Four Growers has created, he said, is an “AI harvesting brain.”
“Going from one crop to another is not a big lift. It’s teaching the robots what a new crop looks like.”
They are also now exploring outdoor crops after going through the John Deere Startup Collaborator program.
“There are so many opportunities because the crazy thing with our food system today is all of our row crops like corn, soy and wheat are so affordable partially because you have a lot of automation, but when you look at all our healthy fruits and vegetables, most of the harvesting is done the same ways it has been for hundreds of years,” he said.
He said automation of the harvesting process will eventually bring prices down for consumers, making eating healthy more affordable.
As the company makes the leap from greenhouses to traditional farms, Contino said the adjustment should not be too difficult. In greenhouses, the harvesting robots move back and forth on rails. Four Growers’ value add to the process is its AI computer vision and motion planning algorithms and its patented gripping mechanism.
In outdoor fields, its robots would be pulled by tractors, either with human drivers or autonomously.
“We can use the existing technology we have already developed and copy and paste it into the outdoor environment,” he said.
For the next generation of innovators at Pitt, Contino’s journey serves as a blueprint for professional success. He encourages students to utilize the resources at the Big Idea Center not just to “win prizes,” but to learn how to execute on high-impact ideas. Contino recommends that Pitt students who are curious about innovation drop into the Big Idea Center (at the corner of Forbes and Meyran avenues).
“Don’t be afraid to dip your toe in,” he said, even if you don’t have your own idea yet. “If you wind up not liking it, nothing is lost. But if you do, you will find a lot of opportunities and like-minded people who will be open to talking to you and giving you good feedback.”