S2G Ventures is a food and agriculture venture fund that invests in entrepreneurs whose products and services meet the shifting demands for healthy and sustainable food. The firm's mission is to catalyze innovation to meet consumer demands for healthy, sustainable, and local food. S2G will identify sectors across the food system that are ripe for change, and form a multi-stage portfolio including seed, venture, and growth-stage investments. It seeks to invest in agriculture, ingredients, infrastructure and logistics, food safety and technology, retail and restaurants, and consumer brands. S2G Ventures was established in 2014 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

S2G Ventures

ff Venture Capital (ffVC) is a technology venture capital firm investing in some of the strongest growth areas to date, including cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, machine learning, drones, enterprise cloud software, and crowdfunding. The firm identifies and invests in technology and technology-enabled companies at its inception across geographies and emerging industries.  With three partners and an acceleration team of 20+ investment and operations professionals, ffVC actively participates with founders to develop products, target markets, and accelerate growth. Since 2008, ffVC has invested in over 100 companies and has helped to create companies with an aggregate market value exceeding $6 billion.

ff Venture Capital

Asimov Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York City and Seattle. Asimov Ventures invests in their areas of expertise: 3D Printing and Robotics. When Asimov Ventures is lucky enough to meet founders in relentless pursuit of opportunity, their hope is that they will choose them as a partner.

Asimov Ventures

Radicle carefully selects innovative ag and food tech start-ups for investment, ensuring that powerful, disruptive technologies reach their full potential. We provide a company building platform, a fertile environment for visionaries in the ag space, not just to grow but to flourish. Their proprietary platform is the only one of its kind in the agriculture industry, thus filling a huge void in the market by identifying the most innovative technologies and accelerating them with a range of value-creation initiatives. Radicle Growth pioneered a concept called The Radicle Challenge to proactively seek out the best and brightest entrepreneurs solving a problem or looking to disrupt an existing business model in the ag and food industries.

Radicle Growth

Everywhere Ventures (fka ''The Fund'') is a first-of-its-kind early-stage venture fund created ​by founders for founders​ to support the next generation of entrepreneurs. Everywhere Ventures is a community-powered venture investing platform that integrates the capital, expertise, and mentoring of experienced founders and operators across ten micro funds. The Fund's $70M+ under management comes almost exclusively from the over 500 founders and operators who are its limited partners. Everywhere Ventures operates from the belief that those who have actually built successful companies are best suited to advise and support early-stage startups. Everywhere Ventures invests in pre-seed deals globally usually in the first financing round the company raises. Emphasis is placed on purpose-driven teams across money, health and work verticals.

Everywhere Ventures

Village Capital uses the power of peer support to change the traditional dynamics between investors and entrepreneurs, providing access to entrepreneurship for everyone.  We recruit entrepreneurs solving specific problems in agriculture, energy, education, financial inclusion, and health. We then put the power of investment in the hands of the entrepreneurs, who award pre-committed seed funding to the two ventures ranked highest by the entrepreneurs at the end of every program. Our programs connect high potential, early-stage entrepreneurs with the people, institutions, and capital they need to succeed. We support early-stage ventures with a 501c3 nonprofit that operates training programs for founders, investors, and communities. We also manage a for-profit, managed investment fund that provides early-stage capital to top graduates of each program, as selected by their peers. Our unique peer-selection model received McKinsey/Harvard Business Review’s prestigious M-Prize for innovation in 2013, and we have supported more than 550 enterprises across 51 programs in 9 countries. Since 2009, Village Capital has supported more than 1,000 entrepreneurs through our programs and partnered with affiliated investment funds, including VilCap Investments, that have invested seed capital in more than 90 program graduates. Over the past 8 years, our program graduates have gone on to generate $61.5M in revenue, reach 8.5 million customers, and create over 11,500 jobs. 96% of our alumni would recommend our program to other entrepreneurs, and to date and 91% of our entrepreneurs are still in business.

Village Capital

SVG Ventures|THRIVE is an investment and advisory firm that partners with public and private organizations on strategy, innovation and global expansion. Formed in 2010 and based in Silicon Valley, SVG Ventures|THRIVE invests in early stage technology companies.  The SVG Ventures|THRIVE team consists of accomplished technology leaders from all over the globe. With its vast network, SVG gets deeply involved with portfolio companies to support their success.

SVG Ventures

NextFab’s mission is to foster personal fulfillment, innovation, and economic development through providing broad-based awareness of, access to, competence with, and commerce enabled by Next-generation digital design and Fabrication technologies and services.

NextFab

Toyota Ventures is a San Francisco Bay Area-based venture capital firm that invests in early-stage startups from around the world. Founded in July 2017, its mission is to discover what’s next for Toyota by helping startups bring disruptive technologies and business models to market quickly. With more than $500 million in assets under management, the firm’s funds include the Toyota Ventures Frontier Fund focused on artificial intelligence, cloud computing, autonomy, mobility, robotics, smart cities, digital health, financial technologies, materials, and energy; and the Toyota Ventures Climate Fund focused on innovative solutions for carbon neutrality.

Toyota Ventures

F-Prime's roots are in one of America’s great entrepreneurial success stories. Fidelity Investments was founded in 1946 and grew from a single mutual fund into one of the largest asset management firms in the world, with over $2 trillion in assets under management. For the last forty years, this venture capital group has had the privilege of backing other great entrepreneurs as they built ground-breaking companies in technology and life sciences, including Atari, MCI, ROLM Corp., Alibaba, Ironwood Pharmaceuticals, and Ultragenyx.  Today, F-Prime's funds are larger and more global, but its teams are still small and local. F-Prime stays true to its entrepreneurial roots. In the US and Europe, F-Prime Capital Partners is investing in healthcare (formerly Fidelity Biosciences) and in technology (formerly part of Devonshire Investors). In other geographies, its sister fund is called Eight Roads (formerly Fidelity Growth Partners), with investment teams in London, Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Mumbai.   Together F-Prime brings a world of insight, domain expertise and relationships to support entrepreneurs. Without the pressure of fundraising from outside investors, F-Prime Capital Partners focuses all of its time finding and helping great entrepreneurs build important companies.

F-Prime Capital

Cibus Fund is an investment firm that specializes in private equity funds advised by ADM Capital. Cibus Fund was founded in 2017 and headquartered in London, England.

Cibus Fund

For US-based startups, identifying and accessing strategic partners in Asia can sometimes seem like a daunting challenge. With TransLink Capital’s support, guidance, and relationships with the most significant companies in Asia, our portfolio companies can develop the necessary long-term partnerships to transform their businesses and expand in Asia and beyond.

Translink Capital

Catalyst employs a research-driven deal flow origination process to identify high-growth sectors and businesses within technology-enabled services.  Catalyst targets  growth-stage businesses with proven business models and attractive unit economics and sectors that are being driven by fundamental, long-term growth trends and have substantial addressable markets.  Catalyst makes both control and influential minority investments, typically has meaningful influence and board representation, and seeks to create value after investment through active involvement in creating, evaluating, and monitoring a portfolio company's business strategy, performance against budget, acquisition efforts, and capital structure evolution.  Catalyst leverages its Advisory Group of seasoned industry professionals to provide portfolio companies with access to experienced industry executives and referrals to potential customers or strategic partners.

Catalyst Investors

Burro

Burro is a developer of an autonomous farming platform for farm use and in other outdoor environments. It follows people and can autonomously run cargo around, relieving people of strenuous tasks which add little value, so that they can focus on more valuable work.

Burro (formerly known as Augean Robotics) offers the agriculture industry off-road autonomous solutions using AI, machine learning, and GPS technologies.&nbsp;

Sustainably solving the food shortages of the future

Smart Farming

Burro’s $24 Million Series B Funding Round

John Deere

To develop a comprehensive automation of the most labor-intensive on-farm tasks

Start-ups providing smart machinery such as agricultural robots and autonomous tractors, as well as other smart hardware devices for crop and livestock management.

Burro (formerly known as Augean Robotics) offers the agriculture industry off-road autonomous solutions using AI, machine learning, and GPS technologies.&nbsp;The company's main product, Burro, is an “autonomous cart” that moves crops across the field after harvesting. Burro expects to further develop the technology to allow the robots to harvest the crops at the right time. Its solution includes a proprietary and patent-pending technology platform called “pop-up autonomy” that helps farmers navigate the cart through the field without prior training. It doesn’t require a centralized control or huge infrastructure installation either, which makes it easier to deploy.&nbsp;As of January 2024, Burro has more than 300 robots working as harvest assist robots in nurseries and permanent crops, covering 100–300 miles a day autonomously. Burros are priced at USD 16,999 (includes hardware cost and a three-year sales/support/software updates service contract).&nbsp;The company claims that a farm with one Burro can allow more than six farmworkers to harvest up to 48% more fruit per day and enjoy a return on investment in less than two months.Key customers and partnershipsIn June 2023, The company has partnered with <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/19677">Pacific Ag Rentals (PAR)</a>, a California-based tractor and farm equipment rental company, to provide Burro's robotic platforms as part of PAR's equipment rentals with nationwide delivery.&nbsp;Funding and financialsIn January 2024, Burro raised USD 24 million in <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/25328">Series B </a>funding co-led by Catalyst Investors and Translink Capital, to expand its commercial, product, and engineering teams, add more dealers, and launch new products, beginning with Burro Grande.

Israeli startup Taranis, focuses on providing a complete digital agronomy solution to farmers using aerial imagery technology across the US, Argentina, Brazil, Russia, Ukraine, and Australia. The company now monitors more than 20 million acres globally, 50% of which is located within the US.&nbsp;The startup captures aerial images using UAVs, which can be analyzed and compared using its own platform, and allows farmers to make precise decisions about planting. The company also operates an area called the “AgroBrain”, which allows precise identification of crop issues. The company claims to account for 70% of the global crop market and equips farmers with the tools to address issues in real time. Similar to peers like Ceres Imaging, Taranis has partnered with incumbent players like John Deere, Syngenta, BASF, and Climate Field View to expand its product reach. As such, Taranis is regarded as a promising startup in global precision agriculture.&nbsp;In 2018, the company expanded its footprint in the US when it acquired Mavrx, a US startup providing aerial imagery solutions to local farmers. Mavrx ran into financial difficulties and consolidation of the two companies yielded attractive opportunities. The consolidation allowed Taranis to integrate Mavrx’s product (full field imagery product with highest resolution on the market) into its platform, thereby fulfilling Taranis’ aim of providing a complete solution. The acquisition strengthened Taranis' offering rather than differentiating it. Taranis believes that further consolidation is likely with imagery and AI solutions.&nbsp;In July 2020, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, the company raised USD 30 million in Series C funding. Key Investors included Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Micron Ventures, and Vertex Ventures Israel. The company expects to use the funds to create more relevant scouting products for growers through its platform and to also look towards expanding into Asia.&nbsp;Previously in January 2023, Taranis introduced <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/taranis-introduces-acreforward-setting-a-new-standard-for-crop-intelligence-301734306.html">AcreForward</a> which provides unprecedented leaf-level insights into growers' crops at higher frequency throughout the season and captures opportunities in every acre to help ag retailers drive more value from every acre. In <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/taranis-launches-ag-assistant-to-transform-farm-decision-making-302198624.html">July 2024</a>, The company has introduced Ag assistant, powered by a generative AI model that integrates data sources from various modalities – including images, text and audio – and with a profound understanding of agronomy.

Taranis

Based in Canada, TELUS Agriculture offers integrated agriculture software solutions to increase profits of farmers and ranchers, agri-businesses, and agri-food, consumer goods and retail companies. Some of the farm management software solutions provided by the company are: Farm at Hand (crop management platform), TKXS (data management), Agrian (precision and informed decision making)&nbsp; and Muddy Boots (food traceability and supply chain management). As of July 2021, TELUS provides its solutions across Canada, the USA, Mexico, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Slovakia, Armenia, Germany, China, and Australia.In July 2021, TELUS along with Rabobank, a Dutch food and agriculture bank, acquired Conservis to deliver a more robust Conservis platform to cater a diverse range of crops and livestock leveraging the former’s know-how and relationships across the food industry value chain and the latter’s portfolio of innovative digital farming technologies and solutions.&nbsp;Founded in 2009, Conservis via its web and mobile platform, provides farmers with planning tools, real-time data capture, and analytics to support better decision making and efficient reporting. Having launched as a permanent crop management platform for tree nuts, the platform has expanded its capabilities to fit crop types such as citrus and grapes.&nbsp; Since 2018, Rabo AgriFinance, a Rabobank subsidiary, has also been a development partner for Conservis to enhance the platform’s financial reporting capabilities.&nbsp;In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/27853">March 2024</a>, The company&nbsp; has completed the acquisition of Proagrica, a provider of agronomic and business data solutions.Key customers and partnershipsIn <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/news/decisive-farming-telus-agriculture-grainfox-140000751.html">October 2023</a>, The company has partnered with GrainFox announced a new partnership to bring more digital grain trade and sell options to Canadian farmers, providing technology-based solutions to support the ongoing transformation of Canada’s agriculture industry.

TELUS  Agriculture

Arable was established with the aim of providing measurements, insight, and predictions that enable growers to address risks with crop management. The key market of focus has been the US, though the company’s product has been used in 39 different countries.The company provides real-time data updates on irrigation and weather, such as reports on plants and crop management, to allow users to make informed decisions, while also being able to precisely measure different farming-related data such as temperature and humidity. Thus, the company falls under the categories of precision and smart farming.The company’s product, Arable Mark, is an irrigation management tool whichsynthesizes climate, plant, and soil data to produce visualizations. Through a web dashboard and smartphone app, Arable Mark exposes precipitation, crop water deficit, soil moisture, chilling hours, and other metrics gathered from sensors. Customers using Arable’s platform have reportedly shown to reduce irrigation by upto 50% and pesticide usage by 15%. In May 2023, the company commercially introduced <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/18120">Arable Mark 3 </a>which includes a 5 MP camera, an optional wind anemometer, and advanced plant and environmental sensing capabilities.The company’s customer base is quite broad in the agriculture value chain, and includes farmers, advisors, insurers, processors, lenders, and governments that find Arable useful to gauge facts on the ground in real time, and in turn reduce risk and increase certainty with decision making.Key customers and partnershipsAs of July 2022, the company serves over 400 customers across 40 countries, and has partnered with agribusiness players like <a href="https://www.bayer.com/en/">Bayer </a>, <a href="http://basf.com/">BASF </a>, and <a href="https://www.nutrien.com/">Nutrien </a>, as well as large consumer food companies such as <a href="https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&amp;ai=DChcSEwjZmt7Vz8HsAhVB5bMKHZDRA-QYABAAGgJxbg&amp;ohost=www.google.com&amp;cid=CAESQOD2vDo-TeLvYzetoyv9iGSw4AnEyiwfscK9vNdjRJ0JPSZXAOBHMYcmrQDPGFTkEl8yzB3t5tB0WHRWzqyKtJE&amp;sig=AOD64_30Xpx6__U8VgKUxkOFpPHuSo99bw&amp;q&amp;adurl&amp;ved=2ahUKEwj--M3Vz8HsAhVCLKwKHa4MAgUQ0Qx6BAgUEAE">Mars </a>, <a href="https://www.lambweston.com/">Lamb Weston </a>, and <a href="https://www.tweglobal.com/">Treasury Wine Estates </a>, as well as fellow startups like <a href="https://www.planet.com/">Planet </a>, <a href="https://www.terramera.com/">Terramera </a>, and <a href="https://www.pivotbio.com/">Pivot Bio </a>primarily to expand the reach of its platform.In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/32961">August 2024</a>, Arable collaborated with Google to leverage agritech to promote water conservation and crop productivity among Nebraska farms.Funding and financials<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11852">In July 2022 </a>, Arable raised USD 40 million in Series C funding led by Galvanize Climate Solutions to support product development, delivery of new services, and international expansion.Despite the Covid-19 pandemic, the company’s sales grew by 4x during 2020 and 2022, while reporting a 300% sales growth in Q3 2020 alone.

Arable

The company’s aerial spectral imagery helps growers optimize water and fertilizer application, focusing on the midstream of the agriculture value chain. The company uses low-flying planes to capture and process these aerial spectral images. The images provide accurate and real-time information on the water and nutrient status of every plant in the field. The company has been focusing on the US and Australia.&nbsp;Its technology can be applied to vineyards, orchards, and row crops like corn, soybeans, and wheat. The company is more of a Data-as-a-Service organisation where the grower will pay Ceres Imaging by the acre and receive imagery and necessary support to integrate the information with broader crop management practices. The company has partnered with established companies like John Deere and Climate FieldView, which find that Ceres Imaging’s solutions (pest and disease detection weeks ahead of human detection) align with their products and services.&nbsp;In <a href="https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2023/03/203925-ai-enhanced-data-analytics-product-suite-ceres-imaging-now-available-to-agriculture-insurers-lenders/">March 2023</a>, The company has unveiled Risk Solutions product suite, designed to power the next generation of risk models for insurers and lenders.In 2019, Ceres Imaging significantly expanded its operations with irrigated row crops throughout the central and western US.&nbsp;During the period, Ceres also nearly doubled its share of the&nbsp;California&nbsp;specialty crop market, going from managing 10% to 18% of all specialty crop acres in the state.&nbsp;In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/16918">March 2023</a>, The company also expanded its services to Portugal and Spain.

Ceres Imaging

<div>
 
 SWIIM (Sustainable Water and Innovative Irrigation Management) System, with the support of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and various US grant universities, operates multi-patented technology developed to manage agricultural water budgets, allowing farmers to efficiently allocate water. The company focuses on the midstream of the agricultural value chain, supporting farmers through their harvesting process. The company’s technology is being widely deployed across western US states.
 
 
 The company provides a device that integrates with existing water measurement tools such as water gauges and analyzes real-time water usage via telemetry, offering farmers information on exactly how much water is used for crops and how much goes back into the ground.
 
 
 The company’s system can be used for any crop and irrigation system, lending its product flexibility and scope for potential expansion beyond the US. 
 
 
 In 2018, SWIIM acquired farm management software OnFarm Systems, which operates a customizable dashboard presenting data collected from a range of different internet of things (IoT) sources (weather, pest control, crop models) on any online device. The acquisition provided SWIIM customers with a differentiated product. Moreover, OnFarm’s 500 clients across the United States, Europe, and Asia at the time were accessible to SWIIM.  
 
 
 In 2020, SWIIM issued its own certification to farmers for the sustainable use of water, conveying to consumers that produce was grown with sustainable water management practices. In addition, SWIIM also introduced its “Certified Water Balance Report”, providing growers with an audited account of their water use. The company’s niche focus on water management, alongside its efforts at differentiation via acquisitions, arms it with potential to broaden its reach.
 
 
 
</div>

SWIIM Systems

Operators of marketplaces connecting farmers, suppliers, buyers, experts and advisors to streamline the farming process.

Start-ups offering software and related hardware solutions for crop operation, crop modelling, weather forecasting, soil analysis, and overall irrigation management using sensors, big data, AI and machine learning.

Startups offering software and related hardware solutions that facilitate real time data tracking and sharing on animal weight, future weight forecasts, and animal health and behavioural analysis using RFID tags, sensors, big data, AI and machine learning.

Start-ups offering drone or satellite imagery to measure and monitor fields, spray pesticides, accurately present biological parameters, control the quality of sowing, etc.

Crop and livestock monitoring startups use AI for their analytics platform

Uses robots for harvesting, weeding, and related agricultural purposes

Uses data analytics and sensors and related technologies to provide crop and livestock monitoring insights

Provides solutions that maximizes efficiency throughout the agriculture value chain

IoT-enabled sensors are used in machinery and equipment to help with data collection

ANALYST_QUICK_TAKE

Philadelphia-based autonomous farming platforms developer, Burro, raised $24 million in Series B funding. The funding round was co-led by Catalyst Investors and Translink Capital, with existing investors S2G Ventures, Toyota Ventures, F-Prime Capital, and Cibus Capital also participating. The company plans to use the raised capital to expand its commercial, product, and engineering teams, add more dealers, and launch new products, starting with Burro Grande. Analyst QuickTake: Burro is highly focused on meeting customer demand by introducing new products and expanding its robot fleet. Previously, in September 2021, the company raised USD 10.9 million in a <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/5718"> Series A </a> funding round to increase robot production to over 500 robots by 2022. However, with only about 300 robots currently in operation, Burro aims to have about 800 robots by the end of the year to meet the rising customer demand.

Burro

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