Insight
3 min read
On fields full of carrots or onions, weeds are an everyday problem that farmers typically address with herbicides or seasonal workers combing through the rows. Rotterdam-based Odd.Bot takes a different approach: an electric robot that drives autonomously through the crop, removes weeds mechanically, and does so with two-millimetre precision. The company was founded in 2018 and raised a twelve-million-euro Series A round in early 2024.
The core product is called The Maverick. The machine weighs 533 kilograms, is fully battery-electric and operates with swappable battery packs, making it deployable around the clock in principle. Where a crew of ten seasonal workers would spend a full day, the robot covers up to two hectares per day. Per arm, it removes two weeds per second, amounting to more than 240,000 weeds per hectare or up to 500,000 per day in total.
Founder and CEO Martijn Lukaart is regarded within the company as the driving force behind commercialisation: someone who takes ideas from concept to market. That role suits a product that is technically demanding but ultimately has to prove its value in the field, not at a trade show or in a laboratory.
The Maverick travels at a maximum speed of 0.55 kilometres per hour between crop rows. The working width is adjustable between 1.50 and 2.25 metres, allowing the machine to operate on flat fields, ridges and beds of varying dimensions. The robot steers autonomously at the end of a row, turns around and enters the next row without any driver intervention.
The system is designed for specific crops where mechanical weed control has traditionally been labour-intensive: carrots, onions, parsnips, beetroot and chicory. Weeds up to seven centimetres tall are removed mechanically. Odd.Bot states that this benefits soil health and protects biodiversity, since no herbicides enter the soil.
Farmers wishing to deploy the Maverick do need a holding of at least eighty hectares. The purchase price is expected to fall between €90,000 and €120,000, depending on the configuration. That is a significant investment, but one that is set against the costs of seasonal labour and herbicide use across multiple growing seasons.
Odd.Bot has its workshop and office on the Galileistraat in Rotterdam, but tests its machines at the Farm of the Future in Lelystad, a trial site at the BioScience Centre on the Runderweg. The combination is pragmatic: Rotterdam for development and production, Flevoland for real fieldwork in one of the most arable-intensive regions in the Netherlands.
The choice of Flevoland as a testing environment is no coincidence. The polder features large-scale, structured plots that align well with the Maverick's specifications, and the region is home to many professional arable farmers working with exactly the crops for which the robot is designed. Experiences at that test site will partly determine how the product develops further ahead of commercial roll-out.
Pressure on the use of crop protection products in European agriculture is mounting. European regulations are pushing towards reduced chemical use, while the availability of seasonal workers in the Netherlands and neighbouring countries is structurally under pressure due to stricter labour migration rules and rising wage costs. Both trends are making mechanical alternatives more attractive than they were a decade ago.
Odd.Bot is not the only company responding to this: several European players are active at the intersection of agri-tech and autonomous robotics. What sets the Rotterdam company apart is its focus on fully autonomous operation combined with the specific crops for which alternative solutions are scarce. Crops such as carrots and parsnips grow close together and leave little room for large machinery, which explains the two-millimetre precision requirement.
For the Dutch agri-tech scene, Odd.Bot represents an example of a startup building hardware in a sector where most tech companies develop software solutions. Hardware companies have longer development cycles, higher capital requirements and more complex supply chains, but they also build products that are harder to replicate. The twelve-million-euro Series A gives the company the headroom to scale from test site to commercial scale. For investors and policymakers committed to making Dutch arable farming more sustainable, that is a relevant signal.
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