Agrivi, one of Europe’s most successful agtech startups, has raised €1 million ($1.1 million) in Series A funding for its farm management, and vertically-integrated traceability software platform.
The Series A was led by South Central Ventures — also known as the Enterprise Innovation Fund — a €40 million vehicle, which counts German development bank KfW and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development as investors. The fund is focused on tech companies in the Balkans region of Europe “on a mission to change the world,” according to its website.
The deal follows two recent agtech funding rounds that also attracted investment from large institutional investors: last week Modern Meadow, a startup manufacturing leather through cellular agriculture, raised funding from Singapore’s state-owned investment company Temasek, and an animal health monitoring company Allflex recently raised funding from a large Canadian pension fund.
Winner of the World Startup Competition in 2014, Agrivi was founded in Croatia in 2013 to solve the issues founder Matija Zulj faced on his blueberry farm, particularly relating to pests. The mission developed from there, and the company says it’s “the most complete farm management software on the market,” with over 15,000 farmers in its network across 150 countries.
Agrivi offers several different products. Its main product is a farm management software for farmers enabling crop planning, monitoring and analysis, weather monitoring and pest management, financial recording, resources and inventory tracking. It has a similar product from the wine industry but which also offers post-harvest wine cellar activity management and traceability reporting. And there are bespoke products for cooperatives and enterprises also to help with the central management of their operations.
Agrivi also has a traceability certificate scheme. This is a QR code which growers and distributors can choose to share with consumers to enable them to track where produce was grown, what products were used on it, and how it arrived on the store shelves. Agrivi is one of the only, if not the only, farm management software platform offering consumer-facing products like this.
“Matija and his team have big plans on their great mission to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges by helping the farming industry become technology advanced and more efficient,” said Jure Mikuž, managing partner at South Central Ventures in a press release. “We’re here to help them achieve this and it will be beneficial for a very large portion of global population if we succeed.”
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