Bernardo Milesy is the founder and managing partner of GLOCAL, the Latin American agrifoodtech accelerator and investor, with a background in technology, investment and banking.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of AgFunderNews.
Only in recent years have efficiency, resilience, and climate adaptation become common topics in discussions about shaping the global food system. For Argentina, however, these things have been a reality for many years.
In a country where conversations typically revolve around inflation, currency crises, political instability, and macroeconomic volatility, a generation of Argentinian startups has been built under constraint rather than abundance.
Because of that, the country today combines a globally competitive agricultural sector with strong scientific capabilities, sophisticated producers, and startups tackling real-world problems in food and agriculture. This combination is increasingly relevant in an industry moving away from the growth-at-all-costs narrative and towards finding tools with real value and making them accessible.
After surpassing $54 billion in global investment in 2021, the global agrifoodtech sector corrected sharply as venture markets became more selective. Investors now care far more about commercialization, unit economics, scalability, and adoption than they did during the peak funding cycle.
That shift favors ecosystems capable of producing capital-efficient and commercially grounded innovation. And that is precisely where Argentina stands out.
Argentina’s underlying advantages
Several of Argentina’s structural advantages are difficult to replicate.
The country remains one of the world’s leading agricultural exporters, particularly in soybeans, corn, wheat, and beef, with a highly sophisticated production system and deep agronomic expertise. Its producer community helped pioneer large-scale no-till farming decades before regenerative agriculture became a global trend, while organizations such as APRESID evolved Argentina into one of the world’s most advanced conservation-agriculture systems.
Elsewhere, the country’s scientific base is equally important. Argentina produced the world’s first approved drought-tolerant genetically engineered wheat through the company Bioceres, reinforcing its role in climate-resilient agriculture and crop science.
But perhaps the ecosystem’s most underrated advantage is talent.
Years of inflation, capital controls, and policy volatility forced founders to develop operational discipline and adaptability from the outset. The cohort that has emerged tends to share a profile increasingly aligned with what global investors now prioritize: early revenue, real producer customers, and international ambition from inception.
Built around real agricultural workflows
Argentina’s agrifoodtech ecosystem is also producing infrastructure and digital platforms designed around how producers actually operate.
Companies such as Auravant, Eiwa, and SIMA are helping digitize agronomic workflows, field trials, and farm-level decision-making, while startups such as DeepAgro apply artificial intelligence to optimize crop protection and reduce chemical use through precision spraying technologies.
In grain quality and commodity infrastructure, ZoomAgri has become one of the clearest examples of Argentina’s ability to export agricultural technology globally. Its AI-powered grain inspection systems are already used across international grain markets and attracted strategic investment from GrainCorp and GrainInnovate.
Meanwhile, ucrop.it is building traceability and sustainability verification infrastructure aligned with rising global regulatory pressure around deforestation, carbon measurement, and supply-chain transparency. Wiagro is modernizing grain storage and post-harvest monitoring through IoT-based infrastructure.
Climate resilience is also becoming an area of growing innovation. Kilimo is working with corporations including The Coca-Cola Company, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google to address water risk and agricultural sustainability, while Satellites on Fire is applying satellite-based monitoring and AI to wildfire detection and environmental risk management.
Taken together, these companies reflect an ecosystem increasingly focused not only on productivity but on building infrastructure for future food systems, climate adaptation, and global agricultural trade.
A growing biotech and biologicals opportunity
One of the most promising areas of Argentina’s agrifoodtech ecosystem is the growing concentration of startups focused on agricultural biotechnology, biologicals, climate resilience, and AI-driven agricultural research.
The ecosystem mapping developed by Argentina’s Bolsa de Comercio de Rosario and BID Lab has identified 83 local agrifoodtech startups and 26 venture funds investing in the sector. A significant share of these startups operate in Ag Biotech and biologicals, while only a subset of funds actively specializes in the segment.
A new generation of startups is emerging across biologicals, microbiome science, crop protection, and computational agriculture. Companies such as Puna Bio, Bioheuris, Nunatak Biotech, BeCaps, Nat4Bio, Elytron, Zavia Bio, Unibaio, and Calice are developing technologies tied to climate adaptation, microbial solutions, crop resilience, and AI-driven agricultural R&D.
Puna Bio illustrates the broader trend well. The company develops extremophile-based biological solutions for agriculture and attracted investment from Corteva and the Gates Foundation, tied to climate-resilient agriculture and food security.
Built for export from day one
The Argentine domestic market alone has rarely been enough to support venture-scale outcomes. As a result, founders tend to think regionally or globally from early stages. By the time many companies raise institutional capital, the relevant question is often not whether they will internationalize, but which market they will expand into first.
That dynamic may become even more important as agricultural trade becomes more regulated and sustainability-linked. For example, the Mercosur–European Union agreement, after more than two decades of negotiation, is moving toward implementation and could significantly increase European demand for traceable and compliant agricultural products from Latin America.
Bridging innovation and global scale
Recent economic and regulatory changes are helping improve the outlook for Argentina’s agricultural sector. The broader direction toward deregulation, trade liberalization, and lower export barriers has strengthened producer sentiment and renewed expectations around long-term competitiveness and technology adoption.
The reforms remain incomplete, and macroeconomic volatility is still part of the landscape. But while a more supportive environment may accelerate growth, it is not the core of Argentina’s advantage. The deeper opportunity lies in the country’s scientific talent, agricultural expertise, and growing pipeline of globally scalable agrifoodtech innovation.
As the ecosystem evolves, one of the key challenges will be connecting Argentina’s entrepreneurial talent with broader pools of capital, international markets, and commercialization pathways. Increasingly, this is creating space for more specialized investors and innovation platforms focused not only on funding startups, but also on helping them navigate the longer adoption cycles, operational complexity, and scaling challenges that define agriculture.
This shift is also driving the emergence of more tailored investment frameworks for agrifoodtech. One example is GLOCAL’s Clean AgriFoodTech Playbook, developed from years of investing and ecosystem mapping across Latin America. The framework emphasizes adoption, capital efficiency, farmer integration, and strategic scaling, dynamics that increasingly define the next phase of Argentine agrifoodtech innovation.
The opportunity
Argentina’s ecosystem still faces real challenges, including macroeconomic volatility, limited growth-stage capital, and a relatively thin domestic LP base. Yet those same constraints have also produced a generation of startups built around efficiency, resilience, adoption, and global scalability—precisely the characteristics increasingly prioritized by investors as the global agrifoodtech industry becomes more disciplined and commercialization-driven.
While Argentina’s current political and economic direction has helped improve international sentiment around the country, the broader opportunity extends far beyond any single government or political cycle. The capital base has not yet caught up to the depth of innovation emerging from the ecosystem, and that gap may become one of the most compelling opportunities in global agrifoodtech over the next decade.
