While agriculture is the backbone of economies across the world. Despite “software eating the world”, farming, as an industry, has been severely overlooked when it comes to innovation and data-driven solutions. AGRIVI, the complete farm business management platform, is on a mission to change this by supporting farmers by leveraging technology to make farm operations efficient. The platform reduces the risk of yield loss, improve crop production profitable, and applies practices that are compliant with food safety, quality and sustainability standards (automated insect pest and disease detection for every field), and much more.
London TechWatch caught up with CEO and Founder Matija Zulj to learn more about how AGRIVI helps solve the global food crisis while supporting farmers, the company’s expansion plans in Europe and the US, and the latest round of funding, which brings the total funding raised to $6.7M.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
AGRIVI secured £4M Series A led by South Central Ventures, European Investment Fund, and Croatian Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Fil Rouge Capital and AgriTech Hub also participated in the round. The funding will enable us to expand its market reach in key European markets and the United States.
Tell us about the product or service Agrivi offers.
We focus on solving problems in the agri-food value chain by keeping in mind farmers’ challenges and the challenges of industries that work closely with farmers.
Our technology supports farmers in making their crop production profitable while making their life easier. We support them in making the entire farm operations efficient, mitigating risks of yield loss, applying practices that are compliant with food safety, quality and sustainability standards, and much more. We often see our farmers doubling their profit margin as a result of cost control, risk mitigation, timely and right decisions.
Besides farmers, we work with other organizations from the agri-food value chain, like food companies, retail companies, agribusiness banks, insurances, and other stakeholders that collaborate with farmers. For example, our customer that produces processed vegetables experienced multi-million USD losses in their production process that was treated as “acceptable loss” to ensure the quality. The cause of the loss was identification of too high levels of pesticide residues, so they had to throw away entire batches of the final product when issues were found. With the support of our farm management platform that has a built-in agronomy database – which includes all available commercial crop protection products and allows their growers to manage entire production – our platform signals to farmers which fields are safe to harvest today and which will be ready in the upcoming days. Our solution minimizes the chance that loss happens while saving millions of USD for businesses.
As a company, we focus on solving real-life problems in the food production process.
What inspired the start of Agrivi?
The story of AGRIVI began when I decided to leave the corporate ICT world and dedicated the time and effort to solving the global food problem. First, I decided to become a farmer myself to understand what it exactly means to grow crops, so I ran my own blueberry farm. Very soon I experienced the real farmer’s world – I couldn’t access the best practice knowledge for growing blueberries and there was no simple, yet affordable software on the market that could help me make data-driven decisions. In 2014 I founded AGRIVI with the vision to change the way food is produced at its core and positively impact one billion lives by helping farmers reach sustainable, resource-efficient, and profitable production.
We immediately started to gather an experienced team of agricultural experts and software engineers with backgrounds in farming and who are eager to disrupt the food industry. Driven by beliefs that knowledge and technology support must be available to all agricultural producers worldwide, we built knowledge-based software solutions that help all agricultural producers: optimize production by enforcing agricultural best practices, protect crops and yield time through automated insect pest and disease detection for every field, and increase quality of life by achieving sustainable and profitable agricultural production.
How is Agrivi different?
Farm management product category is very wide and contains different types of products. The majority of products within the category are focused on basic insights and supporting main agronomy decisions, rarely it goes to full crop production management and more rarely to complete farm business management. Additionally, most products are available only within a single country and often addressing primarily grain growers. There are actually very few complete farm management platforms with support for all crops and that are available on the global market – AGRIVI stands out strongly in this segment.
What market is Agrivi targeting and how big is it?
Europe is very specific as it is very fragmented, and it is difficult for companies to go outside of their borders. There are smaller local farm management software companies with limited capacity to innovate in their local market, and there are only a handful of companies that have a presence across Europe. Complete agritech is still in its early stages. This includes farm management software too, so there is potential for strong growth. AGRIVI is one of the major pan-European farm management forerunners and we plan to strengthen the position in the upcoming period.
What’s your business model?
Our farm management platform is used by the professional grower segment. AGRIVI as a company works directly primarily with large growers, and we reach small-to-medium-sized growers through the value chain. We are happy that today we support great customers like Driscoll’s, Nestle, Kimberly Clark, BNP Paribas, and many others.
We are a B2B Software-as-a-Service company and our revenue comes from subscriptions for our products.
How has COVID-19 impacted your business?
In the previous period, we made a significant growth of our customer portfolio, strengthened the company management, and created a solid ground for the next level of scaling. The investment round is the result of our previous successes on the market and we decided that now is the right time to speed up the expansion.
What was the funding process like?
AGRIVI has strong and continuous year-over-year growth and the industry recognizes us among the leading global farm management platforms as we are one of the rare truly global companies which drives investor interest.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Our farm management platform is now at the level of maturity where it serves the requirements of the leading organizations in the agri-food industry globally.
Our farm management platform is now at the level of maturity where it serves the requirements of the leading organizations in the agri-food industry globally.
Now is the time for bringing it to as many customers as possible, so expansion is the primary goal of the round. Our customers come from over 100 countries, where Europe and the USA represent most of our customer base.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
With the round, we will focus to strengthen our market-leading position in Europe, increase the market share in our target segment in the USA, and build up partnerships for other regions. On the product innovation side, our focuses are on predictions based on AI-driven insights, data collection automation, and compliance with food safety, quality, and sustainability standards.
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