Farmbot is finalising $5 million in Series A+ with Telstra leading the herd

Agtech startup Farmbot will soon close $5 million in Series A+ funding to help with its expansion across Australia and the US. Telstra led the round with $2 million, which is the third time the telco has invested in the company.

Most recently, Telstra invested $1 million as part of Farmbot’s Series A back in October 2021.

Farmbot is an IoT and precision agriculture solution company that allows farmers to monitor their water ecosystems in real time in order to make decisions around resource allocation, asset utilisation and more.

Since first launching, the company has released a range of products and hardware that talk directly to the Farmbot system.

“Farmers can use the same platform to look at water, pumps, rainfall, soil and weather,” Andrew Coppin, managing director of Farmbot, said in a phone call with SmartCompany.

For Farmbot, much of what drives its future direction is its users. Most recently that resulted in its new Farmbot Xtend product.

“What we were hearing was ‘Look I’ve got a lot more watering points to monitor. Could we have something that would effectively extend the range of the Farmbot?'” Coppin said.

“So we built Xtend so they could have up to five more water tanks, monitored essentially with the Farmbot in the middle and any other water tanks within a 5km radius would be able to talk back to that one Farmbot but still maintain the real-time reporting on the water, because that’s a really critical difference for us than other people in this space.”

Farmbot is currently used across 3000 properties in Australia, with an additional pilot in the US. The company plans to launch officially there in February under the name Ranchbot.

“We’re looking forward to exporting good Australian technology to the US,” Coppin said.

But the main priority for the fresh cash injection is rapid expansion in Australia as it moves towards a Series B round in 2023.

“We’re still growing actively here. We just had a record month and we’re on track for a record quarter. We’re working on a few bleeding-edge projects with Telstra that are really exciting and things we hope to bring out next year.” 

Looking further into the future, Farmbot hopes to further collaborate with other companies in the Australian agtech sector to share datasets to create a more streamlined platform for farmers.

“No farmers going to want to have seven apps to run the farm, so we’re working with people like AgriWebb and Pairtree to look at opportunities to provide farmers and ranchers greater insights for how they can run the farm more efficiently,” Coppin said.

“That’s the bigger picture, how do we get to the ultimate grazing platform?”