Ecorobotix Brand Guidelines: The Yverdon Maker of the ARA Plant-by-Plant Sprayer

Two founders and a solar-powered weeding robot.

Ecorobotix was started in Yverdon-les-Bains, in the Swiss canton of Vaud, by Steve Tanner and Aurélien Demaurex. Sources differ on the year. A May 2018 press release issued by BASF Venture Capital, an investor, said the company was founded in 2011; the company’s own history page, the Swiss start-up news site Startupticker in May 2023 and the investment site Vestbee in October 2025 all give 2014. In its early years the name was written ecoRobotix, with a small first letter, as in that 2018 release; today the company writes Ecorobotix.

The company says the two founders met at an environmental conservation gathering, and that the first prototype was built in a kitchen. The 2018 release adds detail: the start-up was first supported by Innovaud, the canton’s innovation agency, received its first seed funding at the end of 2013 from the Fondation pour l’Innovation Technologique, completed a first prototype in 2014 and an improved one in 2015 with help from a research project funded by the Swiss Confederation. The company says it also worked with the federal technology institute EPFL and the HE-Arc engineering school, and hired its first employees in 2015.

The first idea was a light, solar-powered autonomous robot that would drive slowly across a field and spray only the unwanted plants. The 2018 release, which announced a Series B round led by Capagro and BASF Venture Capital, described the company’s robots in exactly those terms. At that time Demaurex was chief executive, and the company was based at Y-Parc, Yverdon’s technology park.

From robot to sprayer.

The robots did not become the product. The company says its D-ARM prototype was developed and tested between 2016 and 2018, and that in 2020 it trialled an autonomous robot called AVO with about a dozen machines in Europe, gathering images to train its software. It set AVO aside, the company says, because of efficiency issues and the legal limits on autonomous machines in several countries.

What came next was a sprayer. In 2021 Ecorobotix launched ARA, which it calls an ultra-high precision field sprayer: a tractor-pulled machine with a six-metre folding frame and a front tank. Startupticker reported in May 2023 that 2021 had been the decisive year, when the team chose to put its technology into a sprayer towed behind a tractor; the chief executive at the time told the site that from then on the product “had the look and feel of a conventional sprayer,” which made farmers more willing to accept it.

ARA uses cameras and artificial intelligence to identify each plant in the field, crop or weed, and treats only the plants it is set to target, Startupticker explained. The company sells this as Plant-by-Plant technology. By October 2025, Vestbee reported, the system had been used in more than 20 countries, with more than 25 crop-specific algorithms; both figures come from the company. In 2023 Startupticker put the number of European countries with ARA users at 15.

Ecorobotix says it received B Corp certification in June 2019 and was recertified in 2023, and that it won SIMA Gold and SIVAL Innovation awards in 2023; we give these as the company’s own account. In 2026 it says it moved into turf care with ALBA, a sprayer for golf courses and sod farms built on ARA’s technology.

Seeing plants one by one.

Precision-farming and agricultural-robot companies sell technology that most people never see up close, so their imagery has to do a lot of explaining. The most familiar picture is a machine working a long crop row, shot low and often in the warm light of early morning or evening, with the rows running away toward the horizon. It speaks of scale and repetition: the field is large, and the machine passes over every metre of it.

The second recurring picture is the screen. Guidance and control makers show in-cab displays filled with colour field maps — bands of colour for harvest, seeding or coverage — with a small tractor or sprayer icon tracing its path. Drone-eye views of fields do similar work from outside the cab, turning a farm into a grid, a patchwork or a set of passes that reads almost like a diagram.

People appear too, usually as working figures rather than models: a farmer at the edge of a field holding a tablet, an engineer kneeling beside a robot between the plants, a dealer pointing at a display. Robot makers lean on close-ups of cameras, solar panels and wheels, and on small machines set against wide open ground.

Much of this imagery is made for the trade-show calendar. Launches cluster around large events such as Agritechnica in Hanover, World FIRA, the agricultural-robotics meeting in France, and the Farm Progress Show in the American Midwest, where companies build branded stands, demonstration plots and live field runs. For a designer the visual language is consistent: greens and earth tones taken from the field, high-contrast interface colour taken from the screens, and clean sans-serif type that looks at home on a display.

Venture-backed and based in Yverdon.

Ecorobotix has grown as a venture-backed company. Its investors have included Capagro and BASF Venture Capital, which led its 2018 round, and, in a round Startupticker covered in May 2023, new lead investors attracted during what the site called a gloomy climate for venture capital. In October 2025 Vestbee reported a Series D round led by Highland Europe, and said the company would show new developments at the Agritechnica machinery fair in Hanover that November.

The management has changed as the company grew. Ecorobotix says that in early 2022 Simon Aspinall became chief executive, with the two co-founders moving into the roles of chief financial officer and chief technology officer, and that in March 2024 Dominique Mégret, formerly of Swisscom Ventures, was appointed chief executive. Vestbee quoted Mégret as chief executive in October 2025.

The company has widened its reach in stages. After the 2023 round it set out to take ARA to the Americas, starting in South America, followed by Canada and the United States, where it says it set up a branch and signed its first dealers that year. It says it then expanded into the United Kingdom in 2024 and into Australia and New Zealand in early 2025, and that it now has more than 200 employees. Vestbee described Ecorobotix as a company that develops, manufactures and sells its machinery; its headquarters remain in Yverdon-les-Bains.

The official website is ecorobotix.com, with a separate section for the turf business.

For a design guide, Ecorobotix shows how a robotics start-up can present a complex technology in the familiar shape of farm equipment. Compare Naïo Technologies, a French maker of electric field robots, and Carbon Robotics, another maker of weeding machines in this series. For this guide we use a lake teal, seedling green and glacier white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ecorobotix’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.