AgTech
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Arable raises $4.25 million to demystify farming with sensors and data
Believe it or not, farmers in the U.S. have faced a labor shortage for years. U.S. citizens aren’t drawn to agriculture the way they were in previous generations. The labor trend has pushed farmers to automate some of the tasks done by agronomists and field workers in the past, using software, robotics and IoT devices like Arable’s. Read More
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Vinsight gives grape and almond growers a high-tech crystal ball
Farmers know how hard it is to predict yield accurately. High-value crops like grapes or almonds prove particularly challenging. Farmers expect, and settle for, twenty to forty percent uncertainty with these crops. Vinsight founder and CEO, Megan Nunes, who grew up in the farming business, found that unacceptable. After almost a decade-long career in the satellite industry, she turned her… Read More
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An eBay for grain trading, FarmLead, raises $6.5 million Series A
Farmers work to feed the world. Yet somehow, corn, wheat and rice sales are still happening at a local level through antiquated paperwork and phone negotiations. Now, an Ottawa-based startup called FarmLead has raised $6.5 million in venture funding to connect grain producers and buyers automatically online, and help farmers get fair prices for what they grow. Read More
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How Hazel Technologies keeps fresh fruit and vegetables from spoiling
Chicago-based Hazel Technologies is on a mission to reduce food waste. The company has developed packaging inserts that, through the magic of basic chemistry, can ward off fungus and mold and slow the spoilage of fruits and vegetables. How big a problem is food waste? The most recent available reports from the U.S. Department of Agriculture have found that each year we waste more than 25… Read More
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Uncorking innovation with Treasury Wine Estates in Napa
What wine makers are going after with applied technology and science is a more profitable piece of an already sizable market. Consumers spent $38 billion on U.S.-made wines alone in 2015 according to the annual Wine Industry Metrics report by Wines & Vines Analytics. Using tech and science to gain every possible advantage can help producers keep their costs and prices down, their… Read More
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FarmLogs raises $22 million to make agriculture a more predictable business
Ann Arbor, Michigan-based FarmLogs has raised $22 million in a Series C round of funding for technology that helps farmers monitor and measure their crops, predict profits, manage risks from weather and pests and more. Naspers Ventures led the round, joined by the company’s earlier backers Drive Capital, Huron River Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners, SV Angel and individual… Read More
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WeFarm’s ‘Quora for farmers’ scales up in Africa with $1.6M from LocalGlobe
Agricultural tech, or agtech for short, has gradually become a fascinating vertical for startups. It’s a huge, traditional market, just waiting for the new tools provided by the cloud. In Europe, a huge food producer, it’s of particular significance. But it’s in emerging markets that it could have the biggest impact. Something like 500 million small-scale farmers around the… Read More
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BrightFarms raises $30.1 million to set up futuristic greenhouses across the U.S.
Agriculture tech startup BrightFarms has raised $30.1 million in Series C funding to bring its high-tech greenhouses, and fresh produce, across the U.S. The company is on a mission to make all fresh fruit and vegetables locally, rather than require them to be hauled from long distances or imported from overseas before they are sold at groceries. Taking a page from the playbook of solar… Read More
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Abundant Robotics spins out of SRI to bring apple-picking robots to the farm
Apples are the second most commonly consumed fruit in the U.S., according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but the way apples are harvested in the orchard hasn’t changed much in the past two centuries. It’s still a manual process, by and large. Now, SRI Ventures, a kind of startup incubator within the Menlo Park research and development firm SRI International,… Read More
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Driving new revenue sources through a digital ag revolution
Ever since the acquisition of the first “Ag Unicorn,” a flood of new digital agriculture startups has been trying to turn investor interest into market traction. Bayer’s recent $62 billion bid to buy Monsanto to create a global agrochemical giant and China National Chemical’s proposed $43 billion acquisition of Syngenta show that the big ag players are hungry for growth… Read More
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