farming
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Indonesian agritech platform TaniHub Group harvests a $65.5M Series B round
TaniHub Group, an Indonesian startup that helps farmers get better prices and more customers for their crops, has raised a $65.5 million Series B. The funding was led by MDI Ventures, the investment arm of Telkom Group, one of Indonesia’s largest telecoms, with participation from Add Ventures, BRI Ventures, Flourish Ventures, Intudo Ventures, Openspace Ventures, Tenaya Capital, UOB Venture Management and Vertex Ventures.
Openspace and Intudo are returning investors from TaniHub’s $10 million Series A, announced in May 2019. The new funding brings its total raised to about $94 million.
Founded in 2016, TaniHub now has more than 45,000 farmers and 350,000 buyers (including businesses and consumers) in its network. The company helps farmers earn more for their crops by streamlining distribution channels so there are fewer middlemen between farms and the restaurants, grocery stores, vendors and other businesses that buy their products. It does this through three units: TaniHub, TaniSupply and TaniFund.
TaniHub is its B2B e-commerce platform, which connects farmers directly to customers. Then orders are fulfilled through TaniSupply, the company’s logistics platform, which currently operates six warehousing and processing facilities where harvests can be washed, sorted and packed within an hour, before being delivered to buyers by TaniHub’s own couriers or third-party logistics providers.
Finally, TaniFund is a fintech platform that provides loans to farmers they can use while growing crops and pay off by selling through TaniHub. Co-founder and chief executive officer Eka Pamitra told TechCrunch its credit scoring system is based on three years of performance, the company’s agriculture value chain expertise and partnerships with financial institutions.
“More than 100 data points are considered when doing the credit risk assessment. For example, for cultivation financing products, TaniFund tailors each credit scoring based on agriculture risks and market risk of each commodity, on top of the typical borrower E-KYC scoring and process,” he explained. “Beyond credit scoring, having TaniSupply and TaniHub as a standby buyer within the ecosystem also helps to mitigate risk of each loan. TaniFund aims to further boost its credit scoring system with smarter data processing and better machine learning models.”
Pamitra said TaniHub will use its new funding to build the upstream and midstream parts of its supply chain — in other words, new cultivation areas, processing, packing centers and warehouses. The company will also expand its coverage beyond Java and Bali to source and sell locally, and continue improving its supply-demand forecast model to help farmers plan crop cultivation and timing, with the goal of reducing price fluctuations and maintaining a consistent supply. Pamitra added that TaniHub will also explore precision farming technology.
Over the last couple of years, TaniHub has started exporting several types of fruits and spices to the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and South Korea. This year, it plans to focus on expanding within Indonesia because the F&B (food and beverage) market there is worth $137 billion and the Indonesian agriculture sector is still highly fragmented, Pamitra said.
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, TaniHub says it was able to grow its revenue 600% year-on-year in 2020 as demand for online groceries increased.
“We postponed our branch expansion plan and focused on increasing the seven existing warehouses’ since there was a surge of demand on the B2C segment and the process of onboarding farmers. This benefited us since the adoption of purchasing fresh groceries online increased significantly, and the willingness of farmers to work with us became remarkably high because the local traditional markets were closed due to lockdowns,” Pamitra said. “Since COVID-19, the eagerness of provincial governments to open communications for TaniHub to work with local farmers and SMEs in their region has been quite impactful.”
TaniHub is now working with several Indonesian government agencies, including the Ministry of Trade, Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministry of Cooperatives and SMEs, to onboard more farmers, F&B businesses and increase exports.
In a press statement, MDI Ventures director of portfolio management Sandhy Widyasthana said, “TaniHub Group has an important role in transforming the agriculture sector and has proven that its presence can deliver positive impact on the quality of life of farmers. We hope our investment can help them continue their work and expand their coverage to more and more farming communities in Indonesia.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Alphabet’s latest moonshot is a field-roving, plant-inspecting robo-buggy
Alphabet (you know… Google) has taken the wraps off the latest “moonshot” from its X labs: A robotic buggy that cruises over crops, inspecting each plant individually and, perhaps, generating the kind of “big data” that agriculture needs to keep up with the demands of a hungry world.
Mineral is the name of the project, and there’s no hidden meaning there. The team just thinks minerals are really important to agriculture.
Announced with little fanfare in a blog post and site, Mineral is still very much in the experimental phase. It was born when the team saw that efforts to digitize agriculture had not found as much success as expected at a time when sustainable food production is growing in importance every year.
“These new streams of data are either overwhelming or don’t measure up to the complexity of agriculture, so they defer back to things like tradition, instinct or habit,” writes Mineral head Elliott Grant. What’s needed is something both more comprehensive and more accessible.
Much as Google originally began with the idea of indexing the entire web and organizing that information, Grant and the team imagined what might be possible if every plant in a field were to be measured and adjusted for individually.
Image Credits: Mineral
The way to do this, they decided, was the “Plant buggy,” a machine that can intelligently and indefatigably navigate fields and do those tedious and repetitive inspections without pause. With reliable data at a plant-to-plant scale, growers can initiate solutions at that scale as well — a dollop of fertilizer here, a spritz of a very specific insecticide there.
They’re not the first to think so. FarmWise raised quite a bit of money last year to expand from autonomous weed-pulling to a full-featured plant intelligence platform.
As with previous X projects at the outset, there’s a lot of talk about what could happen in the future, and how they got where they are, but rather little when it comes to “our robo-buggy lowered waste on a hundred acres of soy by 10 percent” and such like concrete information. No doubt we’ll hear more as the project digs in.
Powered by WPeMatico
Pyka and its autonomous, electric crop-spraying drone land $11M seed round
Modern agriculture involves fields of mind-boggling size, and spraying them efficiently is a serious operational challenge. Pyka is taking on the largely human-powered spray business with an autonomous winged craft and, crucially, regulatory approval.
Just as we’ve seen with DroneSeed, this type of flying is risky for pilots, who must fly very close to the ground and other obstacles, yet also highly susceptible to automation; That’s because it involves lots of repetitive flight patterns that must be executed perfectly, over and over.
Pyka’s approach is unlike that of many in the drone industry, which has tended to use multirotor craft for their maneuverability and easy take-off and landing. But those drones can’t carry the weight and volume of pesticides and other chemicals that (unfortunately) need to be deployed at large scales.
The craft Pyka has built is more traditional, resembling a traditional one-seater crop dusting plane but lacking the cockpit. It’s driven by a trio of propellers, and most of the interior is given over to payload (it can carry about 450 pounds) and batteries. Of course, there is also a sensing suite and onboard computer to handle the immediate demands of automated flight.
Pyka can take off or land on a 150-foot stretch of flat land, so you don’t have to worry about setting up a runway and wasting energy getting to the target area. Of course, it’ll eventually need to swap out batteries, which is part of the ground crew’s responsibilities. They’ll also be designing the overall course for the craft, though the actual flight path and moment-to-moment decisions are handled by the flight computer.
Example of a flight path accounting for obstacles without human input
All this means the plane, apparently called the Egret, can spray about a hundred acres per hour, about the same as a helicopter. But the autonomous craft provides improved precision (it flies lower) and safety (no human pulling difficult maneuvers every minute or two).
Perhaps more importantly, the feds don’t mind it. Pyka claims to be the only company in the world with a commercially approved large autonomous electric aircraft. Small ones like drones have been approved left and right, but the Egret is approaching the size of a traditional “small aircraft,” like a Piper Cub.
Of course, that’s just the craft — other regulatory hurdles hinder wide deployment, like communicating with air traffic management and other craft; certification of the craft in other ways; a more robust long-range sense and avoid system and so on. But Pyka’s Egret has already flown thousands of miles at test farms that pay for the privilege. (Pyka declined to comment on its business model, customers or revenues.)
The company’s founding team — Michael Norcia, Chuma Ogunwole, Kyle Moore and Nathan White — comes from a variety of well-known companies working in adjacent spaces: Cora, Kittyhawk, Joby Aviation, Google X, Waymo and Morgan Stanley (that’s the COO).
The $11 million seed round was led by Prime Movers Lab, with participation from Y Combinator, Greycroft, Data Collective and Bold Capital Partners.
Powered by WPeMatico
FarmWise and its weed-pulling agribot harvest $14.5M in funding
Automating agriculture is a complex proposition given the number and variety of tasks involved, but a number of robotics and autonomy companies are giving it their best shot. FarmWise seems to have impressed someone — it just raised $14.5 million to continue development of its autonomous weeding vehicle.
Currently in the prototype stage, these vehicles look like giant lumbering personnel carriers or the like, but are in fact precision instruments which scan the ground for invasive weeds among the crop and carefully pluck them out.
“Each day, one FarmWise robot can weed crops to feed a medium-sized city of approximately 400,000 inhabitants,” said FarmWise CEO Sebastien Boyer in a press release announcing the latest funding round. “We are now enhancing the scale and depth of our proprietary plant-detection technology to help growers with more of their processes and on more of their crops.”
Presumably the robot was developed and demonstrated with something of a specialty in one crop or another, more as a proof of concept than anything.
Well, it seems to have proved the concept. The new $14.5 million round, led by Calibrate Ventures, is likely due to the success of these early trials. This is far from an easy problem, so going from idea to nearly market-ready in under three years is pretty impressive. Farmers love tech — if it works. And tiny issues or error rates can lead to enormous problems with the vast monoculture fields that make up the majority of U.S. farms.
The company previously took in about $5.7 million in a seed round, following its debut on Alchemist Accelerator’s demo day back in 2017. Robots are expensive!
Hopefully the cash infusion will help propel FarmWise from prototype to commercialization, though it’s hard to imagine they could build more than a handful of the machines with that kind of money. Perhaps they’ll line up a couple big orders and build on that future revenue.
Meanwhile they’ll continue to develop the AI that powers the chunky, endearing vehicles.
“Looking ahead, our robots will increasingly act as specialized doctors for crops, monitoring individual health and adjusting targeted interventions according to a crop’s individual needs,” said Boyer. So not only will these lumbering platforms delicately remove weeds, but they’ll inspect for aphids and fungus and apply the necessary remedies.
With that kind of inspection they can make a data play later — what farmer wouldn’t want to be able to digitally inspect every plant in their fields?
Powered by WPeMatico
VCs have growing appetite for ‘AgriFood’
Venture investors are pouring billions of dollars into feeding their hunger for food and agriculture startups. Whether that trend line is due to enthusiasm for the sector or just broader heavy investing in the VC space is much less clear.
According to a recent report published by AgFunder – a VC and investing marketplace focused on the agriculture and food sectors – the “AgriFood” space is booming. Using data from Crunchbase and several other data partners, the organization published its “2018 AgriFood Tech Investing Report” this morning, finding that investment in AgriFood companies increased 43% year-over-year, reaching $16.9 billion in 2018.
AgFunder classifies AgriFood tech as “the small but growing segment of the startup and venture capital universe that’s aiming to improve or disrupt the global food and agriculture industry.” Their definition is intentionally broad, encompassing everything from crop and livestock biotech, property management systems, and payments, to biomaterials and meat alternatives, all the way up to tech platforms for restaurants, grocers, deliveries and at-home cooks.
While some of the AgriFood tech categories – such as delivery or restaurant software – have long been popular destinations for venture capital, we’re now seeing a more diverse array of startups innovating across the entire food supply chain. According to the report, expansion in AgriFood is fairly consistent across upstream (agricultural and farming) subsectors to downstream (more consumer-facing) subsectors, with each group growing roughly 44% and 42% year-over-year respectively.
The data also shows growth occurring across almost all deal stages. AgriFood saw huge increases in the average deal size and total investment for late-stage companies in particular, as venture-backed startups have grown to global scale. And penetrating and attracting capital from international markets seems more feasible than ever. AgriFood investing, which traditionally has been largely US-centric, is rapidly becoming a global phenomenon, with more than half of total funding – and some of the largest rounds – now coming from companies and investors outside the US.
Powered by WPeMatico
Teaching STEM through the wonders of larva harvesting
There’s hardly enough room to turn around in Livin Farms’ office. Pretty standard, really, in Central, Hong Kong, where space is at a perpetual premium. It’s a small operation for the HAX-backed startup — there’s space for a few desks and not much more. The startup’s last product, the Hive, stands next to the door. It’s a series of innocuous trays stacked atop one another.
But it’s the Hive Explorer I’m here to see. The small tray sits in the middle of the room. Its top is open, the brightly colored bits of plastic drawing the eye from the moment you step through the door. Its contents pulsate with strange, random rhythms. Upon closer inspection, the browns are whites and blacks are alive, a small bed of mealworms wriggle atop one other, chowing down of the remnants of oats left behind by the team.
Above them, a neon yellow tray houses a trio of fully grown beetles and a couple dozen pupae. The former are constant on the move, butting up against one another and sometimes doing more with aims of continuing the life cycle. The pupae lie around, seemingly lifeless, occasionally twitching out a reminder that there’s still life inside.
The Explorer finds Livin Farms broadening its horizons into the world of STEM education. Where past products were focused on scalable sustainability, the new Kickstarter project is firmly targeted at youngsters. And there’s a fair amount to be learned in the bucket full of beetles. Mortality, for one. Founder Katharina Unger grabs a nearby jar and twists off the cap.
It’s filled to the top with dried mealworms. She pulls one out and pops it in her mouth, handing it to me, hopefully. I follow suit. It’s crispy. Not flavorless, exactly, but not particularly distinct. Maybe a bit salty. Mostly it just feels overwhelmingly morbid, showing down on on a little larva as its brothers continue to feast a few inches away.
Protein source of the future, now, to quote The Mountain Goats. Livin Farms also produces a unflavored larva-based powder and a surprising tasty granola as a kind of proof concept for its sustainable high-protein foodstuffs. The mission hits home here in one of the world’s most densely packed places.
[She gave me some to take home, if anyone’s hungry.]
The Explorer also offers youngsters a peak at what many consider the future of sustainable farming — assuming food manufacturers are ever able to break through the stigma of eating insects. Kids are encourage to harvest the larva to avoid overpopulation with a bit of dry roasting. The box serves as a relatively odor-free form of composting. Feeding the bugs simply entails tossing excess foodstuffs into the bin. The little buggers will tear through it, leaving a thin powder of waste in a tray below.
The setup also features a heat plate to keep the worms warm and a fan to regulate humidity, assuring that settings are ideal for the beetles to do their thing. Livin Farms is also opening up the controls to the system via Swift, in an attempt to bring a coding component to the system.
The Explorer went live on Kickstarter this week. Early bird pledges can pick up a the box of worms for ~$113.
Powered by WPeMatico
Enveritas’ technology lets small growers tap into the market for sustainable coffee
Demand for sustainable coffee is growing, a boon for socially conscious coffee lovers — but many small growers are missing out because they lack the ability to verify that their coffee beans are grown using fair labor and eco-friendly practices. In fact, verification is often accessible only to large coffee estates or cooperatives. Enveritas wants to change that. The nonprofit, which recently completed Y Combinator’s accelerator program, uses geospatial analysis to make the process more efficient, enabling it to offer free verification to small farms.
Enveritas’ goal is to end poverty in the coffee sector by 2030. Before founding Enveritas in 2016, CEO David Browning and head of operations Carl Cervone worked at TechnoServe, a nonprofit that serves businesses in developing economies. Browning led TechnoServe’s global coffee practice, while Cervone advised coffee growers in Africa, Asia and Latin America about sustainability trends.
Browning tells TechCrunch that TechnoServe’s coffee team spent a lot of time working with small farmers, many of whom don’t have access to sustainability verification because their farms are too remote or small. The typical coffee grower served by Enveritas has less than two hectares of land, lives on less than $2 a day and relies on cash crops for their family’s income.
“The existing solutions work well for large estates and it can also be effective for farmers organized into cooperatives, but many of the world’s coffee farmers are smaller farmers and not organized into estates,” Browning explains. “For those farmers, the existing solutions can be more difficult to access.”
Part of the reason is because many verification solutions rely on field workers who visit farms and track sustainability standards using pen and paper, a time-consuming and costly process.
To develop a more efficient and scalable system, Enveritas uses geospatial and machine learning to identify coffee farms through satellite imagery and monitor for issues like deforestation. Though it still relies on local partners to visit farms and confirm that sustainability standards are being followed, its technology enables Enveritas to provide verification services for free.
Enveritas checks for 30 standards, which it divides into three categories: social, environmental and economic. “Social” includes no child labor and workers’ rights; “environmental” checks for problems like deforestation, pollution or banned pesticides; and “economic” covers fair wages, ethical business practices and transparent pricing, among other standards.
The organization currently operates in 10 countries, including Uganda, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, with plans to expand into more markets.
Sustainable coffee isn’t just in demand by caffeine lovers with a penchant for social justice. Many of the world’s biggest coffee companies, including Illy and Starbucks, have launched sustainability initiatives as part of their corporate responsibility measures. Offering coffee grown using fair labor or environmentally friendly practices also helps differentiate their products in a crowded marketplace. Research by the National Coffee Association, an American trade group, recently found that many millennials prefer sustainable coffee, with up to two-thirds of 19 to 24-year-olds surveyed said they pick their coffee based on whether it was grown using environmentally friendly practices and fair labor.
While coffee is currently its main focus, Browning says Enveritas’ system can be applied to other agricultural products that need more visibility in their supply chains. For example, it also can be used to verify the sustainability of cocoa, cotton and palm oil.
As a nonprofit, Enveritas faces different funding challenges from other tech startups. Browning says it is currently at the equivalent of being ready for a Series A. Much of its backing comes from coffee companies (Enveritas can’t disclose which ones) that hope to benefit from Enveritas’ solutions.
“One of the advantages of this system is that it reduces the cost for coffee companies relative to the traditional pen and paper system, but it’s also simultaneously free for farmers,” Browning says. “That’s one of the most compelling innovations, so it’s a win-win for both.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Ceres Imaging raises $5 million to pinpoint crop stress for farmers
Oakland, Calif.-based Ceres Imaging has raised $5 million in a Series A investment led by Romulus Capital. The startup uses cameras, sensors and software to pinpoint crop stress in the field for farmers, so that they can apply herbicides, pesticides and irrigation just where it’s needed. Ceres, like several other startups, started out with the notion to build a drone just for… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
Prospera raises $7 million to put computer vision and AI to work on the farm
A Tel Aviv-based startup called Propsera has raised $7 million in new venture funding to build out systems that will monitor and help farmers improve the health of their crops, and optimize their operations. Bessemer Venture Partners led the Series A round. Prospera CEO and co-founder Daniel Koppel said agriculture professionals have plenty of tech at their disposal today from soil and… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
The land grab for farm data
Farmers are adopting smart-sensor technologies and connected farm equipment more quickly than ever, stretching each season to eke out greater yield from finite acreage. This rise in so-called precision agriculture has precipitated a massive influx in unstructured “bushels to bytes” farm data, creating new opportunities for an industry that has previously operated solely in the… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico