Queensland agtech SwarmFarm Robotics has raised a $30 million Series B led by Belgian investor Edaphon to expand its autonomous farming robots into North America, Grain Central reported in October 2025.
The company is one of the few Australian robotics businesses already operating at commercial scale in broadacre farming. Its robots target individual weeds rather than spraying entire paddocks, an approach growers use to reduce herbicide and equipment costs, and its fleet has covered more than two million hectares of Australian farmland, according to the company.
From the paddock
SwarmFarm was founded in 2012 in Emerald, a town of about 14,000 people in central Queensland, by farmers Andrew and Jocie Bate. They were not setting out to build a robotics company but to solve problems on their own property. Andrew Bate is chief executive.
Its SwarmBots are small self-driving machines that move through a paddock on their own. Cameras and computer vision identify each weed, and the robot sprays that plant only, rather than blanket-spraying the field.
The numbers
About 200 SwarmBots are deployed around Australia, Grain Central reported. The company says its fleet has logged 220,000 operating hours and saved millions of litres of farm chemicals, with significant cuts to herbicide use and fuel emissions on customer farms.
The raise
Edaphon, a Belgium-based firm that invests in agtech and biological inputs, led the round. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation contributed $7 million through its Powering Australia Technology Fund, and the Queensland Government’s QIC joined as a new investor. Existing backers Tenacious Ventures, GrainInnovate and Canada’s Emmertech, which led SwarmFarm’s $12 million Series A in February 2023, also took part.
Andrew Bate said the money would “accelerate SwarmFarm’s growth in North America”, expand the team and develop its partner network. “The future of agriculture isn’t bigger machines or bolt-on driverless kits, it’s Integrated Autonomy,” he told Grain Central.
CEFC head of growth capital Malcolm Thornton said the business offered “a commercially viable, scalable solution”.
Jack’s take
This is the kind of company Australia should be loudest about. It came from people who had the problem themselves, it works in the real world, and it is already heading offshore. One of the most advanced autonomous farming companies anywhere came out of a town most people could not find on a map.