SwarmFarm Robotics Gains $30M Boost to Grow Its Farmer-First Autonomy Vision

Australia’s agtech innovator charts a sustainable path to smarter, smaller, and cleaner farming.

Courtesy: SwarmFarm

In the heart of regional Queensland, an agricultural shift is quietly underway. SwarmFarm Robotics, a pioneer in autonomous field technology, has raised $30 million to accelerate its entrance into North America. The Gindie-based company, founded in 2015 by Andrew and Jocie Bate, is designing autonomy in agriculture not as an add-on, but as a fully integrated system that works with farmers rather than around them.

The funding round was led by Belgian “evergreen” fund Edaphon and attracted fresh investment from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) and QIC, alongside support from existing backers including Tenacious Ventures, Emmertech, Tribe Global Ventures, Access Capital and GrainInnovate. With this capital, SwarmFarm plans to scale its North American commercial deployment, expand its engineering and operations team, and strengthen its SwarmConnect ecosystem, which enables third-party agtech developers and machinery makers to build applications that plug directly into its platform.

SwarmFarm’s core innovation challenges the long-standing paradigm that agricultural progress depends chiefly on ever-larger machines. For decades, advances in farm productivity were delivered through bigger tractors, sprayers, and harvesters. But scaling size comes at a price: soil compaction, higher capital and fuel costs, and loss of flexibility. SwarmFarm’s autonomous robots are smaller, modular, and designed from the ground up, not retrofitted, with a vision that productivity should be untethered from machine scale. As CEO and cofounder, Andrew Bate emphasizes, “It’s integrated autonomy … technology designed from the ground up to work with farmers, not around them. With this raise, we’re not just building more robots; we’re building a new farming system that helps farmers do more with less, while preserving the productivity of their land for future generations.”

Already, SwarmFarm’s robots are in commercial operation across Australia and parts of North America. The company reports over 220,000 robot-hours logged across more than two million hectares and claims those deployments have delivered 5.2 million tonnes of chemical savings through precision application. Beyond cost reductions, SwarmFarm argues its platform drives lower emissions, preserves soil health, and grants farmers greater latitude in designing their systems. Its open, modular ethos, enabled by SwarmConnect, distinguishes it from bolt-on kits, closed OEM systems, or narrowly task-focused robotic tools. Under that model, farmers can select, combine, and evolve applications rather than being locked into rigid equipment.

SwarmFarm’s raise comes amid growing investor confidence in ag-robotics. In late 2024, Carbon Robotics in the U.S. secured a $70 million Series D to scale its LaserWeeder platform globally, while European innovators like NeoFarm in France and Saga Robotics in Norway also closed fresh rounds to expand autonomous systems for regenerative vegetable farming and specialty crops. Together, these moves signal a broader shift toward fully integrated autonomy and open-ecosystem models designed to improve yields, efficiency, and sustainability.

SwarmFarm’s farmer-centric philosophy appears to be earning real traction on the ground. Queensland grower Tom Coggan describes what matters most: “It’s not just the robots, it’s the freedom they create. We can design our farming system around what’s best for our land and business, not around the size of the machine. Working with SwarmFarm, we’re reducing compaction, lowering costs and opening up new ways of farming that simply weren’t possible before.”

With this new funding, SwarmFarm is gearing up for its boldest move yet: transitioning from deep roots in Australia into an assertive drive across North America and beyond. As it grows its team, deepens its tech stack, and broadens partnerships, it aims to validate the thesis that truly integrated autonomy can deliver both productivity and sustainability. In the race to reshape agriculture, SwarmFarm is grounding its bet on intelligence, not horsepower.