Aug 23, 2022

Investors fund autonomous tractor company Sabanto

Sabanto Inc. has closed an oversubscribed $17M Series A funding round led by ag-tech venture firm Fulcrum Global Capital.

DCVC Bio, Hico Capital, Yara Growth Ventures, Cavallo Ventures, Johnsonville Ventures and Trimble Ventures also participated in the funding round. John Peryam, co-founder and partner at Fulcrum, joins Sabanto’s board of directors.

“We started Sabanto with our sights set on fixing the lack of labor and resetting the out-of-control capital expenses in agricultural machinery,” Craig Rupp, founder and CEO of Sabanto, said in a news release. “We see a future of smarter, smaller, lighter, less expensive, and more

sustainable swarms of autonomous equipment, substituting horsepower and weight for time.

“We’ve assembled a team of actual ag-experienced engineers and scientists, working alongside real farmers, proving this isn’t just a thought exercise,” he said.

Sabanto has proven its ability to automate a variety of row crop field operations over significant acres throughout the Midwest. Leveraging a fleet of smaller 60 and 90 HP tractors, the company has autonomously tilled, planted, seeded, weeded, applied, and mowed across Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Texas. The company’s advanced mission control platform has been pivotal in deploying multiple systems for multiple days of non-stop operation, pushing the concept to the limit by planting more than 750 acres of corn and soybeans in one season with a single 60 HP tractor.

“Finally, a company is solving our labor problems and taking us in the other direction,” JJ Granstrom, owner of Granstrom Farms, which uses Sabanto tractors, said in the release. “We’re witnessing a huge snowball effect, and it’s all because of the size of the machinery.”

“Sabanto combines a talented and experienced team with a differentiated and well-developed technology stack, focused on an agriculture industry experiencing significant global tailwinds towards autonomy,” John Peryam, co-founder and partner of Fulcrum Global Capital, said in the release.

With this round of funding, Sabanto will accelerate its mission to make autonomy an affordable, reliable and scalable solution for all farmers throughout the world. This capital will also allow the company to increase its Farming-as-a-Service operations to more farmers, on more crops, over more acres, across more states.