Five Seasons Ventures, a new European VC focusing on agrifood tech investments has launched its first fund, announcing a first close on €60 million ($74.3m). Backers include Nestlé, the European Investment Fund, Fondo Italiano d’Investimento, Bpifrance, and selected family offices and entrepreneurs.
Biolumic has created a seedling treatment using UV light that it says boosts the yield of specialty crops by up to 22% while also making plants heartier and more pest resistant.
Wefarm uses AI technology to connect small-scale farmers to crowdsourced information by enabling them to share techniques and advice on anything from how to battle a disease to how to increase their income, through SMS or online in their own languages.
Some of the best-funded cannabis startups are in ecommerce, supply chain management, and retail operations, but if keeping a steady supply is indeed a primary concern for this young industry, investors will need to turn their attention toward the more agriculture-focused end of the cannabis startup spectrum.
We caught up with managing director Francisco Jardim to find out how SP Ventures evolved into a leading agrifood tech investor and how the VC is supporting early-stage startups in South America.
The Hatch accelerator will start its first cohort this spring and CEO Carsten Krome says the effort is a response to the holes he has seen in the current ecosystem for aquaculture technology startups.
2017 was a year of extremes in agrifood tech investing. Large deals pushed the total investment volume up to post an encouraging 29% growth, but deal count fell by 17% to 949, with the most dramatic contraction at the crucial seed stage.
Female CEOs receive 2.7% of all venture funding and women of color receive just 0.2%. The women quoted below are helping to move those statistics and today, on International Women’s Day, we are sharing some of their advice and experience
Though Hummingbird began as a drone-focused precision agriculture company two years ago, it evolved beyond just drones as the team realized that the method of data collection is secondary to the data itself.
Since launching in 2015, Agrofy has signed up 5000 companies, including multinational ag players, that have listed more than 65,000 products.
Micropep Technologies, a French ag biotechnology company has raised a €4 million ($4.94 million) Series A round of funding. Micropep is developing crop enhancement products using micro-RNA or miRNA.
Cargill has launched a new digital platform for aquaculture, the second platform in a suite of digital tools announced in October.
John Deere is the first major ag player to achieve the certification and though several companies are maintaining their certifications over the years, the program hasn’t grown out of the single digits in terms of membership, meaning this move by Deere could have a big impact.
Inscripta is building a business based on selling gene-editing tools, such as instruments, reagents, and software, and in order to create a market for these tools, the company is giving away CRISPR enzymes for free.
Boost Biomes uses DNA-sequencing to study microbiomes and identify interactions that have desired outcomes — in this case, combatting common crop threats.
After several successful trials in citrus, apple, and almond orchards in Spain and Israel, Saturas cofounder and CEO Anat Halgoa Solomon told AgFunderNews that will the company use the new funds to bring its first products to market along with continuing development of a modified version of the company’s original sensor for use on vineyards.
We caught up with Joy Basu ahead of the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit, to discuss how she approaches impact investing in agriculture at The Rise Fund and how agtech can fit into an impact investing thesis.
Mavrx founder Max Bruner said that the change isn’t necessarily about boosting the registered user count, as one might guess, but more about paving the way for more custom and ‘white label’ requests in the future from a more diverse set of customers.
From sensors and software to biotechnology, these nine dairy farm tech startups are working to improve safety and efficiency on the world’s dairy farms.
We caught up with Neal Gutterson ahead of the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit, where he is a keynote speaker, to discuss the strategy behind Dow DuPont’s first GE product and the company’s digital strategy going forward.
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Here’s where AI could make the biggest impact in the agrifoodtech sector