Irish agritech start-up Proveye has secured €1 million in seed funding. A University College Dublin (UCD) spin-out company headquartered at NovaUCD in Dublin, the company is already a leader in remote sensing image analysis for agriculture.
Proveye’s SaaS platform integrates data from drones, ground sensors and satellite imagery with AI machine learning to provide accuracy and clarity for grassland mapping and composition analysis. It is used by agricultural advisors, fertiliser and pesticide suppliers and food processors to provide fast and accurate information about productivity and sustainability on agricultural land to their farmer customers.
The platform rapidly enhances and compiles selected image types into a single view, correcting for weather conditions, sunlight, and a range of other factors which usually make it difficult to isolate clear information to inform decisions on the ground.
Proveye provides agritech companies with a faster, more frequent and, critically, more accurate understanding of metrics relating to crop growth performance such as health and yield, as well as sustainability including biodiversity, carbon measurement and traceability.
The seed funding round was led by Inspire Investments, the private investment arm of Waystone’s management team, and Enterprise Ireland.
“Our global food system is at a tipping point and Proveye is setting the standard for image-based precision agriculture. We see enormous potential for the company’s capabilities at a time where major companies are setting increasingly ambitious sustainability targets. Proveye’s technologies enable a leap forward in precision insights in a market that is ripe for innovation. This is the second heavily differentiated, growth sector Irish company we have backed along with IDPal,” said Derek Delaney, CEO, Waystone.
Jerome O’Connell, CEO and founder, Proveye, said, “This investment comes at a time of rapid growth for the company as we demonstrate the value of a new generation of image-based analytics in agriculture. Our talented team is working with some of the leading names in the agriculture industry to solve challenges previously out of reach to substantially increase certainty and accuracy in management decisions at the field, farm and even regional scale.”
The funding will enable the company to grow its customer base, and capitalise on its proven technology to develop further solutions across grassland, arable crops, and into more specialist areas of UAV image processing.
Jerome O’Connell added, “We are excited to embark upon this new phase of growth bringing our products to solve ever-more complex problems for our clients, building on the long-term power of our insights’ platform. Our clients are invested in this potential as they search for new ways to measure sustainability and productivity at multiple scales. Together, we are redefining the basis on which critical decisions are made in agriculture and natural resources. We’re thrilled for what’s ahead.”
This investment follows on from the company’s success in winning a €225,000 contract with the European Space Agency last September.
