The billion-dollar agritech start-ups disrupting farming!
The billion-dollar agritech start-ups disrupting farming
Farmers Business Network (FBM), dubbed “Google for Farmers”, provides a system of extensive seed, crop and agronomic data, plus marketing and ecommerce platforms for grains, fertilisers and pesticides. Its 7000 members pay cUSD6,000m pa, with the firm’s penetration currently at c3% of total US farmland. Backed by Google’s VC fund and the Singaporean state investment fund, FBM raised USD110m last year and is currently valued at USD660m by Pitchbook.
Agricultural microbes start-up Indigo hunts out organisms to coat seed grains and accelerate plant growth, and has also created an online marketplace to match buyers and sellers of oilseeds and grain (“farmers’ eBay”). Backing included the Investment Corporation of Dubai raising USD250m in its most recent funding, bringing total funding to USD650m and a Pitchbook estimate of cUSD3.5bn valuation.
The worry for investors may be that the recent influx of interest into agtech start ups (due to trade wars and falling prices) could inflate valuations, damaging smaller start ups and the wider sector. The aim will be for these firms to produce sufficient cash flow, without the need to be brought out by bigger agricultural players (Monsanto, DuPont, Deere & Co. etc.).
Comments
Precision agriculture, using technology and data to revolutionise farm efficiency, will likely become one of the biggest & fastest growing sub sectors in the Agetch space. I expect this to become a USD10bn plus industry by 2021, with high teens growth rates.
Precision agriculture is moving from “simple” smart devices to a whole ecosystem of interconnected components, aimed at optimising elements such as seed selection, irrigation, targeted fertiliser/chemical applications & climate impact mitigation. This is being driven by the ubiquity of cheap and powerful mobile devices and communication technologies.
As the article points out, much of the innovation is driven from the US, with issues such as farm sizes & political/ regulatory structures, holding back the development of the industry in Europe.
There are potential gains from this trend for companies such as Deere, Monsanto, Origin Enterprises, Raven Industries and Trimble.
You don't want to miss a Crypto news?
Follow me on Twitter or Facebook
Join SteemFollower and get Upvotes back !
Published on
"
Hi @vlemon!
Your post was upvoted by @steem-ua, new Steem dApp, using UserAuthority for algorithmic post curation!
Your UA account score is currently 4.737 which ranks you at #1472 across all Steem accounts.
Your rank has dropped 1 places in the last three days (old rank 1471).
In our last Algorithmic Curation Round, consisting of 391 contributions, your post is ranked at #124.
Evaluation of your UA score:
Feel free to join our @steem-ua Discord server
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by Mr. Crypto Lemon from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows. Please find us at the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
If you would like to delegate to the Minnow Support Project you can do so by clicking on the following links: 50SP, 100SP, 250SP, 500SP, 1000SP, 5000SP.
Be sure to leave at least 50SP undelegated on your account.
You got a 34.64% upvote from @booster courtesy of @vlemon!
NEW FEATURE:
You can earn a passive income from our service by delegating your stake in SteemPower to @booster. We'll be sharing 100% Liquid tokens automatically between all our delegators every time a wallet has accumulated 1K STEEM or SBD.
Quick Delegation: 1000| 2500 | 5000 | 10000 | 20000 | 50000