“I just love strawberries”: Why This Former Self-Driving CEO Is Betting Big on Farming Robots
Slice of Agriculture Team
08/12/2025
From mapless self-driving cars to strawberry-picking robots, Adham Ghazali’s journey is anything but typical. But his mission? Surprisingly down to earth.
What DailyRobotics Actually Does
DailyRobotics is building robotic harvesters designed to pick strawberries with the precision and care of a human hand. Their flagship product, the Q2, is in its final testing phase and aims to be the first commercially viable strawberry-picking robot that doesn’t bruise fruit or fall behind on speed.
How It All Started
Before strawberries, Ghazali was building self-driving cars. His last company, Imagry, pioneered mapless vision-based autonomy, well before Tesla took a similar path. But after years in the fast lane of robotics, Ghazali craved something more tangible.
A friend’s regenerative farm led him to agriculture, and a series of cold calls to farmers around the world opened his eyes to the labor crisis in farming. "I wanted to do something more down to earth," Ghazali said. “And we're at an inflection point in robotics. What we can do today with software is not the same as five years ago”.
Why It Stands Out
Most robotic harvesters rely on clunky scissors or vacuum systems to pick strawberries, methods that either bruise the fruit or can’t even see the stems in an open field. Ghazali’s team went back to basics. They studied how humans pick strawberries: grab gently, twist, and pull. Then they built a soft two-fingered gripper that mimics that exact motion. It’s large, forgiving, and doesn’t bruise the fruit, even under pressure.
The real magic, though, is in the software. Their patent lies in the algorithm that finds the ripe strawberry, navigates around others, and picks it clean, leaving the stem behind (which, as any grower knows, helps preserve the rest of the box from bruising).
Who It Helps
Strawberry farms, especially in California, face enormous challenges: tight harvesting windows, delicate crops, and labor shortages. DailyRobotics is targeting this exact pain point. Their robot doesn’t just work—it matches human speed. With two arms, each picking a berry every four seconds, the Q2 is already twice as fast as a person, and the hardware could go even faster.
A Customer Story
While full deployments are still on the horizon, Ghazali has already tested the Q2 in the field. At the start, 50% of berries were getting damaged during picking. Now? That rate is down to just 8–10%, and even those are minor, caused by arm movements near nearby fruit, not the picker itself.
Where It’s Going
Ghazali expects to go commercial by California’s 2026 strawberry season, with pilot programs potentially launching even sooner. “The ideal situation is we deploy with California farmers,” he said. Right now, the team is laser-focused on increasing precision and scaling speed without sacrificing the gentle touch.
Conclusion
DailyRobotics may have started with a simple question—how do you pick a strawberry?—but it’s aiming to answer something much bigger: how can robotics ease one of the toughest labor challenges in agriculture?
And yes, Ghazali really does just love strawberries. “I eat them all the time. I’m a low-carb person, and the only legit fruit is strawberries,” he said with a laugh.
