One strawberry-picking robot at a time, Bronco-powered startup Synphony has ascended to an elite tier of Bay Area companies—in less than two years. 

Co-founders Sean Wu ’27 and Lucas Amlicke’s ’25 startup has achieved $8 million worth of total funding as of August this year, been featured on Business Insider, and received the gold stamp from Y-Combinator—a renowned startup incubator that has produced household names including Airbnb, DoorDash, and Reddit.

“You know, we heard from Sam Altman,” said Wu, “I even got to talk to him. I got to meet firsthand people that have created Silicon Valley.”

But before their entrepreneurial ascent, Wu and Amlicke were software geeks who chanced upon each other in a coding program called Headstarter.

“That was summer of ’24. It was just a bunch of kids working on coding projects,” Wu said.  “We just met on that program, did a few projects together. We went to a couple hackathons together. I worked with a couple of people before. It didn’t work out. I think our personalities complement each other and click together.”

Through the forge of intensive projects and competitions—like hackathons, where students code for dozens of hours to attempt to stake cash prizes, company merch and career opportunities—the founders sought to tackle real-world problems. Not software extensions. Not GPT wrappers. But the surging labor costs involved in running Californian strawberry farms. 

Strawberry farming in California nets billions and relies on outdated software compounded with roughly 60% of input costs driven by cultural and harvest labor. As complicated as replacing human labor can become, Symphony understood that their solution had to serve as a more productive and definitely less costly alternative—which is much harder than it sounds. Their approach rested on several components not limited to farm management software—their physical AI platform Forte, and of course, strawberry picking robotics that, to Wu’s attestment, proved quite the troublemaker.

“It’s a bit of an engineering hospital. You got to worry about dust, sunlight and precipitation. All of that messes with your robot arms, GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), and mobile bases as it goes through the farm fields. And that messes with your arms, physical calibrations, motion sensing, and all of that for the model,” said Wu, as he recalled the factors that their hardware designs had to account for.

Most individuals in the current era have grown accustomed to the newfangled rise of startup culture—especially those in the Bay Area—but are unfamiliar with the rather daunting circumstances that extend beyond the time and effort invested in these ventures. Sometimes, literally a matter of life and death. 

“Sometimes, they actually pulled out guns and pointed at us,” said Wu, recalling frightening encounters with unfriendly strawberry farmers in early field-research for their company.

Even during later stages of Synphony, company restructuring and enhancements could prove just as stomach-churning experiences.

“I’ve had to lay off people with wives and kids before. And that’s a crazy feeling. Sometimes I feel like I don’t deserve to have that,” said Wu in regards to the emotional burden that leading a company sometimes presents.

And to Wu, it raises little wonder in that it takes quite the beast of a founder to birth a company.

“I don’t think everyone should start a company,” said Wu. “There’s an incredible amount of sacrifice that goes into it. I don’t think it’s something that everyone will enjoy. Only if you can enjoy pain and can endure pain and prioritize. You get a lot of dopamine from growth or learning and facing hardships and challenges. And you need to do that continuously for years and that’s tough.”

Of course, the prestiges of crafting a rising company can just as easily outweigh the doubts and fatigue of raising it, as Wu illustrates from his own experience on Business Insider reaching out to him.

“They were like “Hey, we’re putting together a list of top 25 robotics startups this year. We saw you guys on Y Combinator. You guys seem super cool,’” said Wu. “My parents were definitely super proud. For me, I’m just seeing problems every day and every month, I’m like we’re about to die. It’s been 11 months and we’re still not dead.”

Accompanied with a deep gratitude of where they are, Wu spoke of his extravagant plans for the company when asked about their execution in the next 5 years: “I want to see robots in space,” he said. “Maybe for excavation purposes, to run experiments, we did get invited to put robots on a spacecraft to conduct plant research suborbitally.”

And when asked about the influence of inspirations and mentors to his life, rather than name-drops of billionaires or nods to other extravagant personalities, Wu unexpectedly pivoted to the fellow members of Santa Clara University. 

“There’s great kids from this generation of SCU kids,” said Wu.”  “Some who mentored me. Some of which are my age or even younger. I think those are all great people to kind of reach out and learn from.”