Steve Saunders

Steve Saunders (Ngāti Ranginui) is a New Zealand horticulture entrepreneur, investor and serial venture-builder and the co-founder and chief executive of Robotics Plus — the Tauranga agritech company acquired by Japan’s Yamaha Motor in 2025.

Saunders’ career grew out of the orchards of the Bay of Plenty. He started in packhouses, managing the orchards division of a Te Puna post-harvest business and built more than three decades of experience across the horticulture and food sector. Along the way he founded the Plus Group of horticulture companies, spanning orchard management, global pollen production and applied technology and co-founded the Newnham Park Innovation Centre in Te Puna, a cluster that has incubated a string of award-winning export businesses. He was an early force behind the snack-sized apple brand Rockit, a founding director of the WNT Ventures tech incubator and an active angel investor through Enterprise Angels.

Robotics Plus began when that industry knowledge met the right engineer. Visiting Massey University with a Zespri group to give the mechatronics team practical feedback, Saunders met PhD candidate Alistair Scarfe. Saunders had long seen a looming labour-shortage problem in horticulture that robotics might solve; Scarfe had the technical depth to build the answer. He backed Scarfe’s work and together they founded a company to develop mechanisation, automation, robotics and sensor technology for horticulture and other primary industries.

Under Saunders, Robotics Plus moved from early kiwifruit-pollination tools to commercial products including a robotic apple packer and, later, the flagship Prospr, an autonomous, multi-purpose vehicle for orchard and vineyard tasks such as spraying and weed control. Yamaha Motor became a strategic investor in 2017 and in 2025 acquired the company outright to form the foundation of a new global business, Yamaha Agriculture, with the team staying in Tauranga. By then Robotics Plus employed around 130 people and was among New Zealand’s larger tech exporters.

Saunders’ profile is noteworthy because he represents a distinctly New Zealand kind of innovator: not a technologist by training, but an industry insider who saw a hard problem early and assembled the people, capital and partnerships to solve it. A long-time champion of Māori investment in agriculture and innovation, he was named 2023 Outstanding Māori Business Leader and his work, explored further in The Robotics Plus story — sits alongside companies like Halter in a wider story about New Zealand reinventing how its farms and orchards run.

Sources: NZ Herald · Robotics Plus · Rural Delivery