Sam Rogers, a 19-year-old cattle farmer turned machine learning expert from North Queensland, was out testing Grazemate, his autonomous drone startup, which can muster cattle without human intervention, when the call came from Y Combinator, the legendary US accelerator.
Reception was terrible, with the call dropping out intermittently, but the message from YC partner Tyler Bosmeny, got through. “Welcome to Y Combinator”. The California VC, which turns 21 next months, was leading a $1.2 million in pre-Seed funding led by Y Combinator, supported by Antler, and NextGen Ventures.
Rogers has now swapped the Queensland outback for San Francisco for YC W26 and the hope that he can bring Aussie ingenuity to the $120 billion US livestock market, starting with California ranches.
Growing up on a cattle station, Rogers knows how time consuming mustering is. Meanwhile he was also working with CSIRO and the Australian Centre for Robotics and publishing machine learning and robotics research from the age of 15, before quitting university at 18 to take his idea from the lab to the land.
“Tools like ChatGPT showed what’s possible when AI handles cognitive work,” Rogers said.
“The exciting opportunity now is bringing that into the physical world. For people like my dad, the work doesn’t happen behind a screen – it happens in the paddock, where time and labour are always in short supply. GrazeMate exists to meet farmers where they are and gives them leverage to do more with less, so they don’t have to carry the entire load on their own.”
Rogers already has GrazeMate mustering thousands of cattle a week, with pilot farms covering 700,000 hectares – about 12 times the size of the Greater Sydney region – queued for deployment across Queensland and NSW.
It puts what farmers used to do in low-flying choppers into an app on their phone, without having to be in the field. GrazeMate’s proprietary reinforcement learning models enable drones to autonomously respond to cattle behaviour in real-time, and mimick stockmanship techniques traditionally passed down through the generations to guide animals from one paddock to another.
Rogers estimates it will save farmers hundred hours monthly as well as hundreds of thousands in annual costs for large-scale operations.
Rogers describes GrazeMate as the agtech version of agentic AI for farmers, and his ambitions don’t stop at mustering.
“We’re building a future where drones give farmers a full view of their paddocks every day. We can tell you how much grass is available, how heavy your animals are, and give real-time updates of everything that’s changing,” he said.
“With that info, we can automatically move cattle or bring them in for sale. Managing a big operation is hard because you can’t be everywhere at once – we’re helping farmers be in the right place at the right time.”
More at grazemate.com.
