Farmbot spent 12 years solving a problem you only have when your nearest neighbour is 80km away. Then it moved its head office to Texas.
The problem
On a big station, the thing that costs you stock is a water tank running dry with nobody there to see it. So someone drives out to check, sometimes hours each way, whether it needs it or not.
The fix
Farmbot puts satellite connected sensors in tanks, troughs and pumps. The water level turns up on a phone, so you only make the drive when something is actually wrong. The Sydney born company launched in 2014.
The scale
More than 12,000 customers across Australia, North America and other markets, on properties running around 10 million cattle and 15 million sheep.
The raise
A US$15M (A$22M) Series B led by Lewis & Clark Partners, with Fulcrum Global Capital, Builders VC, Level VC, Meat & Livestock Australia’s Cultiv8 fund and long time investor Macdoch Ventures.
The paragraph underneath
Read the rest of the announcement. As part of the round, the company did a corporate flip up. Ranchbot Technology Holdings Inc., a Delaware company, becomes the global parent. The head office is now Fort Worth, Texas, and in America the business trades as Ranchbot.
My read
We celebrate the raise and skip the paragraph underneath it. It’s a great outcome for the founders, and the US is where a lot of the ranch land and the capital is. But it’s another ANZ company whose next chapter is headquartered somewhere else, and that pattern is worth noticing.