
IAG invests in Australia agtech player

Insurance Australia Group (IAG) has made an investment of undisclosed size in local start-up Digital Agriculture Services (DAS) via its VC unit Firemark Ventures.
IAG, which claims to be the largest agribusiness insurer in Australia, plans to leverage the company’s geospatial imaging and artificial intelligence (AI) data analytics capabilities to improve risk assessment work on domestic farms and rural communities. There are also plans to co-develop a global product in the same vein.
DAS was established in 2017 in partnership with government science agency CSIRO, which also provided early equity funding alongside agricultural real estate services provider Ruralco and undisclosed private investors. IAG’s investment is said to signal increasing interest in agricultural data due to rising risks around weather and climate change.
DAS estimates that annually around A$125 billion ($82 billion) in agricultural economic decisions in Australia are based on unreliable or incomplete data. The Melbourne-based company says its data and location insights from satellite imagery put science in the hands of decision-makers, including farmers, lenders, insurers, commodity traders, and rural suppliers.
“The technology has advanced to the point where it’s now possible to say what the risk is for this particular rural property, farm or portfolio, from anywhere in the world,” Anthony Wilmott, co-founder and CEO of DAS, said in a statement. “That kind of property-level insight just wasn’t possible even a decade ago. Most agtech is about precision agriculture – helping decisions at plant or livestock level.”
Firemark Ventures was set up with a A$75 million fund in 2016 as a division of IAG’s Firemark Labs financial technology incubator, which was headquartered in Singapore the following year. Portfolio companies include real estate industry software supplier ActivePipe, financial AI analytics provider Hyper Anna, and Airtasker, a peer-to-peers jobs and services marketplace that has raised more than A$60 million to date.
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