ZoomAgri, an Argentine AI-driven agtech company, has raised $3.3 million in a pre-Series A funding round. The round was initially backed by follow-on investors while adding agtech venture capital from Latin America and Australia such as SP Ventures, Artesian, GrainInnovate and Glocal.
Founded in 2017, ZoomAgri’s solution is focused on the Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) of agricultural commodities and food, a $26 billion market, combining technologies such as Computer Vision, Machine Learning and the Internet of Things.
With customers in 18 countries and a database of more than 100 million unique images of various grains and oilseeds, ZoomAgri has a platform for physical quality and varietal purity determination of different agricultural commodities, pre-seeding and post-harvest.
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According to Fernando Martinez de Hoz, co-founder of ZoomAgri based in Argentina, the agtech will now accelerate its growth by launching new solutions and expanding geographically. “We will further strengthen our position in South America, Europe and Australia, while opening up our operations in Brazil in the near future which we consider to be the key market that will drive our growth moving forward as it is a production center and is the fastest-growing region in terms of production,” he said.
The company’s solutions are currently being used by all participants in the supply chain such as seed companies, farmers, grain handlers, exporters, grain processors, surveying companies and laboratories.
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The agtech offers a suite of products to serve the entire agribusiness production chain, such as a solution for determining the purity of malting barley, wheat and soybeans varieties in real-time, which is currently commercialized in 5 different continents, with clients such as AB InBev, Boortmalt, Soufflet, among others. ZoomAgri also has developed a solution to determine the physical quality of grains and oilseeds in real-time.
ZoomAgri has a Vision-as-a-Service (VaaS) business model, in which customers receive the hardware devices at zero initial cost, and only pay for the analysis they perform, either paying for every individual analysis, or a monthly fee with an unlimited amount of analysis available.
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“We have validated a strong need from the industry to provide a more precise, transparent and traceable quality determination throughout the whole supply chain. We started with malting barley, as it made sense due to our installed customer base, followed by soybeans and other commodities such as wheat, corn and many other commodities,” Matias Micheloud, CTO and co-founder of ZoomAgri, said.
