Chinese agricultural drone platform secures Series A round
Farm Friend, a Beijing-based agricultural drone services platform, has raised a RMB50 million ($7 million) Series A round led by Gobi Partners.
Existing investors GGV Capital, Shunwei Capital Partners, ZhenFund, and Yunqi Capital – a VC firm founded by former Lightspeed Venture Partners’ executive Ron Cao – also re-upped, a statement said.
This marks the third round raised by the start-up since its establishment in February of last year. Shunwei provided $1 million in an angel round in last March, while GGV came into a pre-Series A round three months later, with participation from ZhenFund and Shunwei.
Farm Friend - known as Nongtian Guanjia in Chinese - is an online platform that connects professional drone operators and individual farmers. Similar to ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing, it allows farmers to book the most conveniently located drone operators to spray pesticides or fertilizers on their fields.
Urbanization has contributed to a decrease in the workforce in the rural areas in China and agricultural drone technology helps address this problem. The technology also enables farmers to know precisely where to apply pesticides and fertilizers when needed. Farm Friend has worked with local governments and industry agencies to establish industry standards.
At present, the company has more than 1,000 drone operation teams registered on its platform, with over 5,000 agricultural drones available. It is active in 10 provinces, including the major agricultural regions of Heilongjiang, Hubei, Hunan, and Shandong. Farm Friend so far has provided services covering 66,670 hectares of farmland; it is expected to hit 533,300 hectares by the end of this year.
Following the latest investment, the company plans to grow its team and expand services into more cities by attracting third-party drone operators on its platform. It will also set up offline service centers to educate farmers on the use of drone technology.
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