Jamie Hutchinson had grown weary of copper. After acquiring and replanting Domaine d'Audaux, a vineyard sprawled across southwest France, in 2015, the reality of conventional air-blast sprayers—and the chemical loads they demanded—wore thin. That irritation, as it happens, proved useful.
On June 9, Cordon Technologies, the London startup Hutchinson founded to rethink how vineyards spray, closed the first £1 million of its seed round. The British Design Fund led the deal, backing a company that promises to help farmers slash chemical treatments not by selling them new equipment, but by retrofitting the machinery they already own with AI-driven controls.
It's a pitch that might resonate in a sector caught between mounting regulatory pressure and the stubborn economics of replacing capital equipment. Whether it scales remains to be seen.
Building from the Ground Up—Literally
Hutchinson launched Cordon Technologies in July 2023 alongside Annelise Brbora, the company's UX lead, who came at the problem from a different angle. Both are listed as inventors on a patent application filed in February 2024 for a pesticide sprayer and nozzle system—a detail that underscores how hands-on the pair have been in designing the hardware itself.
The company's first product, the Loop, is already working in the field. It mounts to existing sprayers and uses what Cordon calls "Concentration Variable Rate" technology, mixing multiple treatments in real time rather than pre-blending them. Cordon claims the system can reduce foliar treatments by 35%, a figure drawn from the company's own field trials rather than independent verification. Still, Tech.eu has noted that the startup has secured early commercial traction among UK vineyards, even if specific customer names remain under wraps.
Growth Capital, Growing Pressures
The fresh funding will accelerate the Loop's commercial rollout and bankroll development of the Cordon Sprayer, an unreleased system pairing precision droplet creation with AI-powered machine vision. Hutchinson and his team are betting that timing matters. The UK surpassed 1,000 commercial vineyards in 2024—a milestone that reflects the country's expanding viticulture footprint, according to industry estimates—and the EU's Farm to Fork strategy has set an ambitious target: a 50% reduction in pesticide use and risk by 2030.
That regulatory drumbeat is hard to ignore. For growers already squeezed by input costs and labor shortages, spraying less while maintaining yields isn't just environmentally appealing—it's economically necessary.
This seed round follows an £840,000 pre-seed raised in April 2024, co-led by Britbots and Fund F, with participation from SFC Capital, The Evenlode Foundation, and Zinc. Cordon also secured a £187,000 grant from UKRI in June 2024. The British Design Fund's involvement carries some weight; the investor received a £5 million commitment from the British Business Bank in December 2025 to back product-focused UK startups, signaling appetite for hardware ventures in a market often tilted toward software.
The round is characterized as a first close, which typically means Cordon is still raising and may announce additional investors later.
A Crowded Field, a Different Bet
Cordon isn't alone in chasing precision agriculture's promise. Norway's Saga Robotics raised £8.4 million in August 2025 and recently expanded its UV-C disease control platform across 600 acres with California's Castoro Cellars. France's Naïo Technologies pulled in $33 million in late 2022 for its Ted vineyard robot. Bonsai Robotics, which raised $10.5 million in October 2023, is trialing electrostatic spraying systems in vineyards this year.
But Cordon's approach—retrofitting existing equipment rather than asking farmers to replace it wholesale—may offer a faster path to adoption, particularly for growers wary of sinking capital into unproven platforms. It's a more incremental bet, one that sidesteps the chicken-and-egg problem that has plagued agricultural robotics: farmers hesitate to invest until the technology is proven, but proving the technology requires farmer investment.
Whether that calculus works in Cordon's favor depends on execution and, perhaps more than the founders might like to admit, on how quickly regulations tighten and how willing UK vineyards are to experiment. The company's origin story—born from one vintner's frustration—suggests Hutchinson knows the customer. Now he has to prove he can sell to them.
