Sam Rogers, a 19-year-old livestock farmer turned machine learning expert from North Queensland, was testing Grazemate, an autonomous drone startup that can herd cattle without human intervention, when he got a call from legendary US accelerator Y Combinator.
The reception was terrible, with intermittent phone calls, but I did get a message from YC partner Tyler Bosmeny. “Welcome to Y Combinator.” The California VC, which turns 21 next month, had raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding led by Y Combinator and backed by Antler, NextGen Ventures and Meat & Livestock Australia.
Mr Rogers has now swapped the Queensland outback for San Francisco for a YC W26 that he hopes will bring Australian ingenuity to the $120 billion US livestock market, starting with ranches in California.
Rogers, who grew up on a cattle farm, knows how long it takes to round up cattle. But he also worked with CSIRO and the Australian Center for Robotics, publishing research in machine learning and robotics from the age of 15, before dropping out of university at 18 to take his ideas from the lab to the field.
“Tools like ChatGPT have shown us what is possible when AI handles cognitive tasks,” says Rogers.
“The exciting opportunity now is to bring that into the physical world. For people like my father, work doesn’t take place behind a screen, but on the farm, where time and labor are always in short supply. GrazeMate exists to meet farmers where they are, giving them the leverage to do more with less, so they don’t have to shoulder all the burden themselves.”
Mr Rogers is already collecting thousands of cows a week with GrazeMate, and pilot farms covering 700,000 hectares, about 12 times the size of the Greater Sydney region, are on standby for rollout across Queensland and New South Wales.
This allows the work a farmer was doing with a low-flying helicopter to be reflected in an app on his or her phone, even when he or she is not in the field. GrazeMate’s unique reinforcement learning model allows the drone to autonomously react to cow behavior in real time and guide animals from one ranch to another, mimicking traditional livestock husbandry techniques passed down through generations.
Rogers estimates that this could save farmers hundreds of hours each month and hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual costs for large-scale operations.
Rogers describes GrazeMate as an agtech version of agent AI for farmers, and his ambitions extend beyond muster.
“We are building a future where drones give farmers a complete view of their fields every day. They can tell how much grass is available, how much weight their animals are weighing, and can provide real-time updates on everything that is changing,” he said.
“With that information, you can automatically move cattle or bring them to sale. It’s hard to manage large-scale operations because you can’t be everywhere at once. We’re helping farmers be in the right place at the right time.”
For more information, please visit grazemate.com.
