Australia's AgriWebb upsizes Series B to $29m

The incoming investors are Germin8 Ventures, a specialist agricultural technology and food technology VC firm, and iSelect Fund, which focuses on nutrition and the future of health. Both are headquartered in the US.

Other participants in the round include the family office of UK land and property owner Grosvenor Group, the corporate VC unit of Canadian telecom player Telus, and the Australian government-backed Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC). Grosvenor is investing through a dedicated food and agtech division formerly known as Wheatsheaf Group.

AgriWebb is one of several agtech start-ups out of Australia and New Zealand that are beginning to get traction with mainstream investors as well as sector specialists. They tend to fall into one of three categories: agricultural biotech, robots and machinery, and farm management platforms that integrate software and hardware offerings.

In the past 18 months, the likes of Leaft Foods, which extracts proteins from plants for use in a range of foods, Halter, a supplier of GPS-enabled smart collars for dairy cattle, and Loam Bio, which uses microbes to sequester carbon in farm soils, have all closed rounds of USD 15m or more.

“Specialist VCs with agri-food mandates have catalysed participation from sector agnostic VCs like Main Sequence Ventures and climate crossovers such as CEFC spinout Virescent Ventures,” Robert Williams, who leads agri-food VC investments at Artesian, told AVCJ earlier this year. “Global investors are also coming in like Khosla Ventures and Time Ventures.”

AgriWebb was founded in 2014 by a group of fifth-generation farmers. It provides a suite of digital tools that leverage data to improve farm efficiency, profitability, and sustainability. Users can do virtual ranch mapping, manage inventory, track individual animals to calculate yield, manage workers and assign tasks, and gauge the performance of grazing strategies, crops, and fertilisers.

The AgriWebb app is used by more than 16,000 farmers globally – the US and UK are key markets, in addition to Australia – and supports oversight of 19m animals across 136m acres of land. Over 250 new users sign up every month.

The new capital will go towards rolling out new partnerships, features, and capabilities with a view to creating a unified agtech ecosystem. Early-stage US partners include RanchBot and RanchSense. The company has also secured grant allocations under the USDA Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities scheme for projects to help farmers introduce measurably climate-friendly practices.

“There are very few software offerings capable of accelerating the regenerative agriculture practices our climate stands to benefit from, and even fewer that target livestock production rather than being at odds with it,” said Michael Lavin, a managing partner at Germin8, in a statement.

“AgriWebb is a standout in terms of the value brought to its customers, its top-quartile performance across a variety of SaaS [software-as-a-service] benchmarks, the expansive data opportunities available to the company and the authenticity in the founders’ backgrounds deeply rooted in ranching.”

AgriWebb noted that its latest capital raise “has defied increasingly challenging investment market conditions.” It believes this reflects market demand for data-driven tech that can measurably impact global food security and climate realities.

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Australasia
• Early-stage
• Technology
• Industrials
• Australia
• Agriculture
• Germin8 Ventures
• Clean Energy Finance Corporation
• Grosvenor
• TMT