On the floor at EvokeAg 2026: Luke Harwood’s reflections on Australian Agtech

EvokeAg 2026 drew over 1,500 delegates from 18 countries to Melbourne in February, with the Federal Government committing another $450,000 to support the event over the next three years. The visible momentum is real, and the cohort of companies I spent two days meeting reflected it. Most were past proof-of-concept by a meaningful margin, with paying customers, demonstrated commercial repeatability, and in most cases farming operations that had bought the technology and were getting value from it. Andrew Bate’s framing from the EvokeAg stage set the right standard: the test is whether farmers buy it and whether it works. The companies I met had largely cleared that bar.

However, what kept surfacing across my conversations with business owners was a different question – “What comes after the technology is proven?”

What the sector has assembled

Research is moving toward commercialisation. CSIRO’s Jen Taylor named the research-to-commercial-outcomes gap from the stage, and it remains real, but the architecture to address it is more developed than it was five years ago: university spinout programs, RDC-backed commercialisation pathways, an accelerator and incubator ecosystem that has deepened considerably across the sector.

The RDCs have also shifted from their traditional grant and research roles into something more active. Artesian’s VC as a Service (VCaaS) model with GRDC’s GrainInnovate fund, alongside the more recent launches of Hort Innovation’s Venture Fund and MLA’s investment programs, represents a structural change in how industry bodies engage with innovation. These are mandate-driven investment vehicles oriented around grower outcomes, which is materially different from writing grants and hoping commercialisation follows.

Firms that have concentrated specifically in agrifood tech have built real sector knowledge over several years. Artesian, Mandalay Ventures, Sparklab Cultiv8, Tenacious Ventures, and Virescent Ventures have each made this space a focus rather than a thematic allocation. Understanding agtech revenue models, customer dynamics, and exit ceilings takes time, and those firms have done enough of it to back founders through the early commercial stage, which is when the backing matters most.

Scaled strategic players have moved alongside them. GrainCorp’s $30 million Ventures program is structured around its operational priorities in people, capabilities, and assets. MLA is investing in the enabling infrastructure relevant to the pastoral sector. These are commitments from organisations with distribution relationships and industry credibility that financial capital alone cannot replicate, and they accelerate adoption in ways that go well beyond writing a cheque.

There is also a growing stream of international interest, exemplified by the Israel Trade Commission’s dedicated side event at EvokeAg, bringing several Israeli agtech companies to explore the Australian market. That external attention reflects something real about what Australian founders have built over the past decade, and it also shows where the value will go if domestic scaling mechanisms fall short.

Where the gap sits

The sector’s challenge, as best I can read it after two days on the floor, sits between the two stages this infrastructure covers reasonably well. The specialist VCs have funded the early commercial stage effectively, and the strategics are investing to protect and extend their own operations. What is less developed is the mechanism for taking a business from a few million dollars in annual revenue to fifteen or twenty million, at a pace that works for founders, customers, and the farming operations that depend on the technology.

Part of this comes back to a structural mismatch in the VC model. Venture funds are designed around a return profile where a small number of exits at very high multiples justify the broader portfolio. That model has done what it was designed to do in Australian agtech, funding a generation of early commercial businesses and accepting early-stage risk that few other capital sources would take. But the ANZ agtech exit ceiling sits well below what the VC model needs to generate its target returns. That creates a structural problem for funds that require much larger outcomes to work. The result is a cohort of businesses that are performing, growing, and serving customers well, but sitting outside the return parameters their backers were built for.

There is a separate but related problem in businesses with hardware components alongside software revenue. Several of the companies I met were navigating the same challenge: hardware revenue compresses the blended valuation multiple relative to pure-software peers, while the capital required to fund inventory runs or manufacturing cycles is not well served by either the VC market or the lending market. Debt providers with the capacity to finance purchase orders and inventory typically lack familiarity with agtech customer profiles and revenue models to get comfortable with the risk, which means founders end up reaching for equity to solve what is structurally a debt problem, at a dilution cost the capital structure probably does not warrant.

How I think it plays out

While I don’t have a strong data set to back that up, the conclusion I left Melbourne with is that consolidation addresses the scale problem. Some of founders I met were already thinking along similar lines and the logic they were working through was consistent: combining complementary businesses with aligned customers and overlapping market positions to create an asset that is more resilient and attractive than either business would be on its own.

Scrip-for-scrip structures allow founders to do this without cash changing hands or taking on dilution at a compressed multiple, and the combined entity reaches a revenue scale where growth capital becomes accessible at a better valuation and on better terms. Private equity has strong appetite for recurring, low-churn revenue, provided the businesses it is looking at have reached a threshold of scale. I think the main reason we haven’t seen it yet is that most Australian agtech companies are currently below their scale requirements.

The mechanism to get there, whether it is consolidation, patient growth capital applied to individual businesses, or something new the market develops, will reveal itself in time. What seems reasonably clear is that the sector has assembled most of the components of a high-functioning innovation system, that the early stage is well-supported, and that the remaining challenge is translating a proven early commercial business into a scaled one at a pace that keeps the value here, rather than making it most accessible to international acquirers who are watching the same dynamic closely.

If you are building an agtech business and working through what the inorganic path to scale looks like in practice, or an investor looking to take advantage of the opportunity Australian agtech presents, I am interested in the conversation.