Bayer AG

Bayer AG is a German life-science company headquartered at Kaiser-Wilhelm-Allee 1 in Leverkusen, North Rhine-Westphalia. Friedrich Bayer and Johann Friedrich Weskott founded it on August 1, 1863 in Barmen (now part of Wuppertal). Bayer AG is registered with the Cologne District Court under HRB 48248. Its shares trade on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange/XETRA under the symbol BAYN and are part of the DAX and Euro Stoxx 50 indices. Bill Anderson chairs the Board of Management. In fiscal 2025 the group reported sales of EUR 45.575 billion and EBITDA before special items of EUR 9.669 billion, and it had about 89,750 employees in 2025.

Bayer runs three operating divisions: Pharmaceuticals (prescription medicines), Consumer Health (non-prescription products), and Crop Science (agriculture). The Animal Health business was sold to Elanco in 2020. Crop Science is the largest division by sales, with EUR 21.622 billion in 2025.

The agriculture business was reshaped by the acquisition of Monsanto, agreed in September 2016 and completed on June 7, 2018. The deal gave Bayer Monsanto's seed and trait portfolio, including corn, soybean, cotton and vegetable seeds, and the glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide franchise, alongside Bayer's existing fungicides, insecticides and herbicides. This makes Bayer a crop protection incumbent in agriculture. Robotic and camera-guided weeding systems are often positioned as alternatives to broad herbicide spraying, so their growth bears directly on Bayer's chemical business.

Glyphosate litigation has been a major factor for the company. Roundup has faced tens of thousands of US personal-injury claims alleging a cancer link. In June 2020 Bayer agreed to pay up to about US$9.6 billion to resolve a large share of the claims then pending, and by 2023 around 165,000 claims had been filed in total. The US Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that glyphosate used according to its label does not pose a cancer risk. On June 26, 2026 the US Supreme Court ruled in the Durnell case that federal pesticide law (FIFRA) preempts state-law failure-to-warn claims where the EPA has approved the product label.

Bayer's digital agriculture work runs through Climate LLC, its digital farming unit. Its flagship product, FieldView, collects machine and field data for yield analysis, product-performance evaluation and agronomic decisions. Bayer says FieldView is available in 23 countries and covers more than 250 million subscribed acres. The company also works with agtech start-ups through open-innovation programs and its Leaps by Bayer investment arm. In July 2026, for example, Bayer announced a partnership with Polybee to combine Polybee's autonomous drone technology with Bayer's agronomy expertise for crop intelligence for Australian vegetable growers.

Bayer does not make robots; its relevance lies in the crop protection, seed and digital farming markets in which agricultural robotics companies operate and compete.