Indian farming runs on small plots and scarce hands. A tractor is too big for most fields, too expensive for most farmers, and there are fewer workers willing to spend long days under the sun than there used to be. A Hyderabad startup has spent nine years building the answer in miniature: a robot the size of a suitcase that drives itself down the rows, spraying, seeding and tilling while the farmer watches from the bund. It is called Neo, and it is now rolling out to farms in India and far beyond.
Neo is a fully electric, tracked field robot built to do the repetitive jobs that eat a small farm’s time. It sprays, mows, shallow-tills, seeds and hauls, swapping between modular implements mounted at its front, rear and top. Two electric motors drive the tracks with torque vectoring, so it can turn on the spot like a skid-steer machine, and its 48-volt DC power ports feed the tools it carries. The company says it can cover up to eight acres in an eight-to-ten-hour shift, carrying 300 kilograms itself and up to a tonne with a trailer.
Seeing its way down the row
The clever part is how Neo finds its way. It navigates on RTK-GPS with an inertial backup, while AI vision and LiDAR sensors watch for people, animals and unexpected hazards in real time. The onboard autonomy stack plans its path down the row and around the headland, with a remote manual override if a human ever needs to take over. Its batteries are swappable 48-volt lithium-ion packs, each good for three to four hours of field work, so a spare pack keeps the robot running while the first one charges.
At 1,140 millimetres long, 645 millimetres wide and 565 millimetres tall, and 300 kilograms, Neo is deliberately built for the narrow rows of vegetable and flower crops. A wider sibling, Neo+, is aimed at orchards and wider row spacing. The company puts the price from $19,995 — a fraction of a tractor — and says the machine delivers the precision and reliability of large mechanised equipment at a far lower running cost.
From Shark Tank to the world’s fields
XMachines was founded in Hyderabad in 2017 by Trivikram Kumar, who spent months on Telangana farms showing farmers early prototypes and listening to what they actually needed. The company has been incubated at ICRISAT since 2019, and its first robot, the X100, has been sowing, transplanting, weeding and spraying on farms across Telangana, Karnataka and Haryana. In March 2024, Trivikram took XMachines to Shark Tank India, where Namita Thapar and Ritesh Agarwal invested Rs 72 lakh for 4% of the company.
Neo is the next step up: a smaller, tougher, fully tracked machine aimed at the world. The company reports 30 units sold or leased in 2025, and is targeting 250 units in 2026, with dealers being onboarded across the Middle East, Asia, Australia, Europe, Latin America and North America. For a machine built to serve the small farm, that is a strikingly large ambition — Indian farm robotics, heading out to the world’s fields.
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