Chicago's Sabanto is automating agriculture, raises $17m
Chicago, IL – Swarming farm autonomy company Sabanto, Inc. today announced it has closed an oversubscribed $17M Series A funding round led by leading agtech venture firm Fulcrum Global Capital, with participation from DCVC Bio, Hico Capital, Yara Growth Ventures, Cavallo Ventures, Johnsonville Ventures, and Trimble Ventures. 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. We see a future of smarter, smaller, lighter, less expensive, and more sustainable swarms of autonomous equipment, substituting horsepower and weight for time," said Craig Rupp, founder and CEO of Sabanto. "We've assembled a team of actual ag-experienced engineers and scientists, working alongside real farmers, proving this isn't just a thought exercise."
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 over 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. We're witnessing a huge snowball effect, and it's all because of the size of the machinery. It's more expensive. It's harder to operate. It's harder to resell. Blah, blah, blah. It's the hamster wheel from hell," exclaimed JJ Granstrom, owner of Granstrom Farms and customer of Sabanto.
"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," said John Peryam, co-founder and partner of Fulcrum Global Capital.
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.
Headquartered in Chicago, Sabanto's mission is to accelerate autonomy in agricultural machinery to solve two primary problems: (i) the increasingly acute scarcity of labor in rural areas and (ii) ever-increasing capital expenses for modern ag machinery. Sabanto's core competency revolves around low-cost retrofits of existing agriculture machinery regardless of make or model, along with the development of necessary supporting software to maximize the utility of autonomous technology, thereby increasing producer ROI. Learn more at www.sabantoag.com.