Sabanto, the Ames, Iowa-based autonomous tractor retrofit company, has appointed John M. Raines to its board of directors, the company announced Friday. The appointment follows the close of an oversubscribed Series B funding round led by Leaps by Bayer and backed by Sustainable Forward Capital, InnoVenture Iowa, Fulcrum Global Capital, DCVC Bio and Yara.

Sabanto did not disclose the dollar size of the round. Proceeds will fund expansion of manufacturing and deployment capacity, hiring across engineering and commercial teams, and continued development of the company's proprietary Vehicle Operating System and Vehicle Mission Control software.

What does Raines bring to the board?

Raines spent more than three decades in agriculture, data and technology commercialization. He most recently served as president of TELUS Digital Agriculture & Consumer Goods, where he led a global unit applying cloud computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning to farm and consumer-goods clients, growing revenue at double-digit rates and pushing the division into 50 countries.

Earlier in his career, Raines served as chief commercial officer of The Climate Corporation, where he helped build and commercialize Climate FieldView, now one of the industry's largest digital farming platforms. He also held senior leadership roles at Monsanto for more than a decade.

Raines currently sits on the board of FMC Corporation, where he serves on the audit and nominating and corporate governance committees. He also serves on the board of Sydenstricker Nobbe Partners, a 42-location John Deere dealership group, where he chairs the audit committee.

Why is Sabanto targeting retrofit autonomy?

The company's pitch is brand-agnostic hardware and software that bolts onto equipment farmers already own, sidestepping the capital outlay of buying new autonomous machines. Founders say the model addresses two pressures tightening margins across U.S. row-crop operations: rising labor costs and high equipment replacement bills.

"Agtech is littered with innovative technology that never became a great business. Building the technology is only half the battle. The hard part is getting it into farmers' hands and scaling it. John has actually done that at a level very few people in this industry have. That's why I'm excited to welcome him to our board," said Craig Rupp, founder and CEO of Sabanto.

What does the Series B signal for agtech capital flows?

The round marks one of the more prominent ag-autonomy financings of the year and pulls in a strategic mix of corporate and venture investors. Leaps by Bayer, the venture arm of Bayer, is leading, while Yara, the Norwegian fertilizer giant, joins as a corporate participant — a notable signal given Yara's focus on input retail and crop nutrition rather than machinery.

InnoVenture Iowa's presence ties Sabanto more closely to Iowa State University-linked capital and the Ames startup cluster, where the company houses its engineering and manufacturing operations. The investor base also includes Fulcrum Global Capital, an agtech-focused firm, and DCVC Bio, the deep-tech and biology arm of DCVC.

Raines framed the bet in farm-economics terms. "I'm excited about the benefits autonomous technology can deliver to farmers. Between the shortage in labor and the cost of production on farms today, autonomy provides a whole new avenue to drive productivity and return on invested capital," Raines said.

What comes next for Sabanto?

The company plans to deploy capital across three workstreams over the next 18 months: scaling retrofit manufacturing capacity, expanding field-deployment crews in the U.S. Corn Belt, and continuing software iterations on its operating and mission-control platforms. Sabanto has not named a target number of retrofit units or acreage covered, but Rupp has previously indicated that 2026 commercial focus will center on row-crop service providers and large-acreage growers evaluating autonomy as a labor hedge ahead of the 2027 equipment-replacement cycle.