Editor’s Note: Michael Dean led AgFunder’s investment in Israel’s Fieldin — a $12 million Series A led by Zeev Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based venture fund managed by Oren Zeev, who has backed companies such as Houzz, Audible, Chegg, TripActions. Cavallo Ventures, the venture capital arm of Wilbur-Ellis, Mindset Ventures and existing investors Germin8 Ventures, Gal Ventures and Terra Venture Partners were also part of the round.
You’d be forgiven for finding the growing farm management software space overwhelming; there are now hundreds of different software tools for farmers across crop types globally and more every week. At AgFunder, we’ve reviewed many of them so it takes something special to capture our attention.
Meet Fieldin, a data analytics and decision software platform for the $25-plus billion specialty crop market.
What makes Fieldin stand out? Fieldin focuses heavily on fruits, nuts and vegetables and is fast becoming the most in-depth offering for that sector with the most established dataset.
Unlike many offerings that provide point solutions to track one task or measure one data point, Fieldin is a true one-stop-shop for growers to seamlessly monitor and track their farm operations from one simple interface. The large-scale specialty crop sector is driven by operational capabilities, so by focusing on farm operations and overlaying agronomical and financial data, Fieldin has hit a sweet spot for growers in this industry.
Its ease of use and ability to identify and drive productivity improvements across all mechanized farm operations is the reason they are acquiring customers hand over fist.
For example, during the current almond harvest season in California, Fieldin’s smart farm control center helped a grower identify inefficiencies that reduced labor and harvest operation costs by more than 30%.
Because of that quick ROI (in just two weeks in the previous example), customers are staying with them; they’ve had zero churn in the last 12 months and their customers have told us they can’t live without them. Fieldin’s Grower Support Team of regional experts no doubt helps to ensure customer success and has led to Fieldin’s presence on over 300,000 acres since it launched in 2013.
How does it work? FieldIn captures data by placing IoT devices on tractors, sprayers, harvesters and other machinery in combination with weather and satellite data. They also allow farmers to manually input PCA reports, photos and yield estimations. Then, via machine learning algorithms on this syndicate of data, it presents the data points as actionable information for planning farm operations such as when and how to harvest or spray, managing operational risks to help growers maximize their production through a single, user-friendly dashboard. Fieldin also offers tools for actioning those recommendations including an award-winning smart spraying module and new smart harvesting app. The level of detail that Fieldin provides in terms of field data and logic identifying spray and harvesting errors is a huge bonus for producers. Using the platform, the grower can compare and find efficiencies across all of their various equipment, operators, blocks, ranches – anything a grower wants to optimize across an operation.
As our coinvestors at Zeev said, “Fieldin is changing agriculture as we know it,” Zeev said. “The Fieldin team has created a world-class platform that is already the go-to control center for commercial growers.”
Fieldin plans to use the new capital to support its rapid growth: tripling its sales, grower support and technical team in the US, and expanding its R&D team and product development efforts out of its engineering and data science headquarters in Israel.
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