LaserWeeder vs John Deere autonomous tractor + See & Spray in 2026

LaserWeeder

Carbon Robotics (founded 2018, Seattle; CEO Paul Mikesell) makes the commercial LaserWeeder, which combines computer vision with high-power lasers to kill weeds without chemicals. There is no consumer price: it is B2B agricultural equipment, not a product sold to consumers. By its own reporting it has serviced more than 250,000 acres, eliminated over 15 billion weeds, and runs as 150-plus machines on 100-plus farms across roughly 14-15 countries; a modular, faster LaserWeeder G2 launched in February 2025.

A load-bearing classification point: the LaserWeeder is a towed, pull-behind implement with no locomotion of its own (a conventional tractor pulls it). Carbon's original 2021 LaserWeeder was a self-driving platform, but the company deliberately pivoted to a smart-implement format for faster payback; its separate Carbon AutoTractor kit (April 2025) is the autonomy and mobility layer, a retrofit that adds remote-supervised driverless operation to John Deere 6R and 8R tractors, at early and limited commercial release.

On funding, Carbon's own Series D release puts total funding at $157 million (a $70M Series D led by BOND in October 2024); an aggregator figure of about $276 million is not primary-verified and is not asserted, and the deployment figures are company-reported.

John Deere autonomous tractor + See & Spray

John Deere's autonomy spans the Autonomous 8R tractor (tillage, shown at CES 2022), a second generation shown at CES 2025 (Autonomous 9RX, the 5ML orchard tractor, a 460 P-Tier dump truck pilot, and a battery-electric mower), and the See & Spray targeted-herbicide system (from the Blue River acquisition), which Deere reports customers used across about five million acres in 2025. These are enterprise agricultural products sold to farms, not consumer goods, so there is no consumer price. The 8R autonomy is tillage-focused, not full-task farm autonomy, and the 9RX and 5ML are early rollout, not at-scale shipping.