Built for the long game. Designed for early adopters.

Kiwi Robotics was created to solve one of the biggest pressures in commercial horticulture: the need for early, accurate, and reliable thinning decisions across large-scale operations.

Every season, growers face rising labour costs, unpredictable weather windows, and crew skill variability — all while trying to protect crop quality and maximise returns.

Yet despite advances in horticultural tech, standard heat maps still left orchard managers asking the same questions:

Is a subsequent round of thinning needed? What will a subsequent round of thinning cost?

Those very questions were the genesis of Kiwi Robotics.

Kiwi Robotics was founded by horticulture specialist and orchard investor Mike Steele, together with a world-class team of AI and robotics engineers. Their broader innovation network has delivered technology with real social impact — from cloud-based tools improving digital access in underserved communities to early agricultural robotics that promote healthier, more sustainable food production.

A solution built by growers, for growers

Kiwi ingenuity meets global AI capability

What sets Kiwi Robotics apart is the intelligence behind the system. While the hardware — including 3D cameras, GPU processing, and GPS-RTK positioning — enables the scan, the real advantage is the AI that powers it. Our platform is built and continuously refined by a highly skilled team of AI developers with deep expertise in automation and robotics. This level of capability simply isn’t available in traditional heat-map tools or competitor systems, giving growers clearer insights and more confident decision-making.

This background in purpose-driven innovation, paired with decades of real orchard experience, shapes the heartbeat of our company today: practical tools, built with purpose, that eliminate guesswork and help growers stay ahead of seasonal pressure.

Mike knows firsthand the consequences of incomplete data and thinning crews who lack the tools to focus on the highest priority zones. He has lived through the labour constraints and the domino effect of inadequate thinning. Kiwi Robotics is the tool he once wished he had, and now one built for growers across the country.

The breakthrough behind Kiwi Robotics isn’t just a better heat map — it’s the ability to turn complex data into clear, exact, workforce-ready instructions.

By pairing New Zealand horticultural insight with advanced automation and AI engineering, we can capture precise fruit data and convert it into:

exact row numbers
metre-specific thinning zones
priority-ordered zones
estimated hours

What once required slow, manual counts in selected bays—a limited sample at best—is now a precise, AI-driven plan using actual counts across the entire orchard that any crew can follow.

A platform designed for scale

Our company was built for the realities of large orchards and corporate growing operations:

✓competing priorities

✓ labour bottlenecks

✓variables crew experience

✓pressure to execute consistently across multiple blocks

is growing with the industry — and with the people who run it.