This Thanksgiving, we at AgFunder are thankful for our portfolio companies. Over the last year, we have invested in transformational food system companies, operating across the supply chain, from farm to fork.
Israeli imagery analytics for ag platform Taranis has closed a $20 million Series B round of funding led by Viola Ventures, an Israeli venture firm making its first investment into agtech.
Flying drones BVLOS will enable agricultural operations to capture all of their fields in one go, increasing the efficiency of the technology, according to Thomas Haun, VP Agriculture Solutions at PrecisionHawk.
One agrifood tech VC vet heads from Monsanto Growth Ventures to Temasek while indoor growers get together to develop industry safety standards, plus agtech M&A in this week’s brief.
American Robotics CEO Mozer said that the decision to raise a second seed round followed an overwhelming response from growers when the company released a video of its autonomous drone, Scout, in 2017.
Drone-enabled aerial data and safety platform provider PrecisionHawk has raised a $75 million Series D round from a laundry list of major tech and agriculture players.
Twenty Seventeen has been quite the year for the agrifood technology startup scene, with some of the largest-ever funding announcements on record. And we’ve been pretty busy at AgFunderNews too, nearly doubling our member and subscriber base to 55,000 and posting over 450 original articles.
It was an exciting year in farm technology, to say the least, with several exits and record deals set and then overtaken by even larger deals just weeks or months later. Check out the standout deals of 2017.
As the hype fades and more growers test out drones on their own operations, what they really want from drone-focused technology is becoming clearer and raising the bar for startups in the field.
Israeli drone software startup Skyx has raised an undisclosed seed funding round to commercialize its software that allows one operator to control a fleet of up to six crop spraying drones.
Nileworks claims its multi-copter drones are able to see the shape of a field and spray pesticides just 30cm above, reducing drift.
Local businesses are starting to survey the damage wrought by the category 4 storm and remote sensing has a clear role to play, with companies turning their technology to help the recovery efforts.
SlantRange, a US drone sensor manufacturer and imagery analytics provider using computer vision for agriculture, has won a contract with Bayer CropScience’s crop breeding and research programs in the US.
Agriculture data has been a big disappointment for the majority of farmers, particularly in the US. But there is still much potential if approached the right way, according to Igor Ivanov and Ellen Czaika.
The potential for drones to revolutionize agriculture reached fever pitch in 2015, but there were soon signs that the technology may have been overhyped. Step-in the next generation of drone tech startups hoping to resolve the main painpoints.
Modern sensing instruments have advanced far beyond simple photographic film. Today’s devices measure light, radiation, and heat by capturing different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, writes Joe Byrum.
It was a busy week for agtech startups with new partnerships and awards, while regulations around gene-editing make slow progress.
A bumper week of fundings includes startups offering satellite imagery analysis, drones-as-a-software, milk products, wine e-commerce and more.
Santiago Tenorio from Cascade Global, a multi-family office based investing in agtech, writes about the financial return potential of the space.
Awards, partnerships and agtech product trials dominate this week’s industry brief.
