Spanish agtech startup Agroptima has raised €1.2 million ($1.4m) in Series A funding for its farm management software platform.
Agroptima says it is the largest farm management software platform in Europe with 1.3 million acres under management across 1,700 clients.
This investment round was led by Spanish venture capital firm Athos Capital with the participation of ESADE BAN, a network of investors from the Spanish university ESADE where Agroptima’s founder graduated. Existing shareholders also invested.
The Agroptima app, which is capable of linking to agricultural equipment such as Cerea, an agricultural GPS system for self-driving tractors, records daily operations such as sowing, fertilizing and harvesting. Farmers and their advisors can then download crop data, performance reports and field notes showing the dosage of pesticides employed, as well as the traceability reports required by the Ministry of Agriculture.
Farmers can also access information about which crops are the most profitable and identify loss-making tasks in order to make better decisions and save costs. The startup has started to work with agrifood companies, including a corn-nuts producer that uses Agroptima to manage its 10,000 hectares of cornfields, according to a blog post on the ESADE website.
“Our vision is to automate data collection so farmers can focus their efforts on data analysis and decision-making and less time in data collection,” wrote Emilia Vila, CEO and cofounder in a press release. The company claims it saves farmers one hour of work per day on average.
Agroptima, which expects to exceed €1 million in turnover in the next 12 months and charges $249 for a yearly subscription, plans to use the funding for the internationalization of the company, which is currently mainly focused in southern Europe, and for ongoing technological development.
“When farmers realize that they can have all the data about their fields and their crops at their fingertips, they never go back. We think it is essential to pamper and to listen to our users. We conduct periodic site visits and answer questions by phone or chat with a turnaround time of less than 24 hours,” Vila, founder and CEO, told ESADE in a blog article. “Our customers are individual farmers, family farms and small and medium-sized agricultural firms that grow row crops such as grains as well as vineyards, fruits, vegetables, olives and nuts.”
In September, the company plans to roll out Agroptima Maps, a series of tools that will allow farmers to view their tasks and fields in a much more visual, map-based format within the Agroptima app.
Agroptima was created after a group of seven farmers from the Barcelona region identified the need for a simple way to make a note of agricultural tasks, keep their field notes up to date and control their farming costs. They joined Vila and her colleagues in founding the business in 2014.
This latest round of funding takes the startup’s total funding to nearly €2 million after a €500k seed round two years ago that included the participation of business angels including Barcelona serial entrepreneur Carlos Blanco, and ESADE BAN.
