Israel’s crop monitoring technology firm AgroScout has completed a Series A investment round of US$7.5 million to expedite the development of its AI cloud platform for remote agronomy and to increase accessibility to currently unserved farms around the world.
The AgroScout platform collects data to create powerful analytics for actionable insights in crop management, it also allows all types of grower to efficiently comply with the rising demand for sustainable crop protection and carbon accountability.
AgroScout monitors a crop from emergence stand count, continuing season-long through canopy coverage estimates and plant biomass. It also provides improved yield predictions prior to harvest.
Pests and diseases can be continuously monitored, enabling early interventions which decreases pesticide application quantities when infestation levels are low and curative treatments are highly effective.
Farmers, agribusinesses, and food manufacturers are provided with an affordable way to build more competitive, sustainable, and environment-friendly food and agriculture supply chains.
AgroScout’s mission is to best leverage AI cloud computing and the availability of low-cost digital imaging to bring efficient, sustainable, and accountable farming to the 95% of the 500 million unserved farms of the world.
“Our decision to rely fully on stable off-the-shelf hardware has paid off and allowed us to focus our efforts on our remote agronomy analytics, positioning AgroScout as a true anywhere, anytime provider.” says AgroScout CEO Simcha Shore “We are now proud to bring on new partners to expand our platform to almost any field crop and to offer sustainable and efficient remote agronomy services to most of the 500 million unserved growers.”
The AgroScout platform offers 5 layers of interlaced data analysis to counter yield loss. It does so by leveraging user-generated data, collected with off-the-shelf drones and mobile phones, to provide an affordable early detection agronomy solution.
AgroScout eliminates the need for costly drones, field operators and long training. Farmers purchase their own low cost drones and receive minimal training to get started. The company’s uniqueness lies in its low cost data collection and in the simplicity of the system for the grower.
On-going national projects, in conjunction with multinational corporations, growers, and crop protection companies, as well as a growing individual customer base, are now under way in the United States, Latin America, South Africa and Israel.
This latest investment round was led by Kibbutz Yotvata. Other investors include Agriline (a trust of which Vincent Tchenguiz is a discretionary beneficiary), Kibbutz Yiron, The Trendlines Group, several private investors, and a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority.
Dubi Goldman, Business Development Manager of Kibbutz Yotvata said “We believe in investing in breakthrough agriculture technologies and AgroScout perfectly matched what we were looking for. As farmers of over 60 years, working in difficult desert areas, we appreciate the tremendous value AgroScout brings to growers.”
