Modular Science
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Modular Science was a San Francisco-based agtech startup, founded by Peter Sand, that built modular machines designed to automate farming processes. Accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2017 batch, it developed specialized farming bots already operating in fields in Petaluma, California, with the goal of automating 99% of vegetable farming processes within six months — charging about $2,000 per acre, half the cost of human labor. The company later went out of business; its Y Combinator profile lists it as Inactive and PitchBook records its status as Out of Business.
02 / Modular Science FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Modular Science was a capital-constrained hardware play in a notoriously difficult market. Public records show only $120,000 of accelerator funding from Y Combinator; no further venture rounds were disclosed. Building outdoor farming robots — heavy hardware with long sales cycles into agriculture — on seed-level capital, it never reached sustainable commercial scale and PitchBook records it as Out of Business.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- YC batch
Modular Science, founded by Peter Sand, joins Y Combinator's Summer 2017 batch with robots already in the field in Petaluma, CA, aiming to automate 99% of vegetable farming within six months.
- Out of business
PitchBook records Modular Science as Out of Business; its Y Combinator profile is marked Inactive.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
The only funding disclosed is $120,000 in accelerator funding from Y Combinator (Aug 2017).
- 02
No revenue, valuation or loss figures were publicly disclosed; the company closed without a failure postmortem or audited financials.