Kodama raises $7M for semi-autonomous logging machines

A logger in his twenties who wants this job has to be on site at 5:30 a.m., which usually means leaving home around 4:00 or 4:30. Then he spends nine or ten hours a day in a machine, driving over stumps and rocks and through ruts. Merritt Jenkins, co-founder and CEO of Kodama Systems, described that routine to The Robot Report, and he cited one logging contractor who went through eight skidder operators in a single year. That turnover is the problem Kodama is betting on.

Kodama has raised $7 million in its latest round, bringing its total to $14 million. Konvoy Ventures and Breakwater Ventures co-led the round, with participation from Blue Forest Asset Management, NYA Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and others. The money is meant to support commercial deployments, deeper partnerships with equipment manufacturers, and development of what the company calls supervised autonomy for complex off-road work. Kodama began in wildfire risk reduction in the western United States and has since turned to the timber industry in the Southeast.

The approach combines two modes. The machine handles repeatable tasks by itself, while an experienced operator, working remotely through teleoperation, takes over the complicated work and unusual situations. The company's first target is the skidder, the machine that uses a large claw called a grapple to pick up cut trees and drag them to a landing, where they are loaded onto trucks. Kodama says its technology is running 10 to 14 hours a day on work sites. Jenkins said that each day of remote operation generates about one terabyte of training data, and that the company chose to start with teleoperation and add autonomy step by step, rather than the reverse. The company says that data advantage grows as more machines are deployed.

Kodama works inside the existing forestry-equipment ecosystem rather than selling a separate kit that is bolted on afterward. Jenkins said the company is integrated with two of the three largest equipment manufacturers in the world, which he argued makes it possible to use the sensors and fault-detection systems already on the machine. Kodama has worked with a customer in Georgia for more than a year, and says it is now moving into other machine types, including the cutter and the loader.

For a logging contractor, the immediate gain is a way to keep machines running with fewer people on board. A skidder operator who works from a remote station, or who oversees several machines, does not have to endure the same physical load. Kodama says its hybrid approach improves machine utilization, which matters when the hiring problem is what keeps machines idle. The company has not published a timeline for wider rollout, pricing or customer counts beyond the Georgia account, so any claims about how quickly this reaches the wider market remain untested. What the figures do show is that the technology is already moving timber on real sites, and the question for the next few years is how far that work can spread.