Agriculture technology company lands $5.65 million in pre-seed and seed funding
California-based agriculture tech company InnerPlant has recently acquired a whopping $5.65 million in combined pre-seed and seed funding. The round was lead by MS&AD Ventures, joined by Bee Partners, UpWest and TAU Ventures.
InnerPlant is an agriculture technology company founded back in 2018 by co-founders Shely Aronov and Rod Kumimoto. The funding has been raised to aid their progress towards a breakthrough for the agriculture industry: a method to track plant progress by directly deriving information from plants.
Using research, development and a safe protein, farmers can see signals about their crops’ thirst, nutrient levels and can even see if their crops are being attacked by pests.
The company started by placing physical sensors on the leaves of tomato plants. “Once we analyzed the scale of farming, we began creating optical signals that can be made from satellites,” Shely Aronov said. The new protein their plants create can be detected from a spectrometer or camera, meaning farmers can analyse how their crops are performing digitally. Farmers should be able to collect the information using satellites, or even drones or planes if their fields are smaller.
InnerPlant started by debuting their first product, the InnerTomato, in 2020, and is now developing more crops such as InnerSoy and InnerCotton.
The research was inspired as challenges such as climate change, more demand from growing populations and an increased amount of pests are leading to tougher harvests. This technology is made to enable farmers to keep better care of their crops and to avoid the use of things such as pesticides.
Shely claims that “the tomatoes are proof-of-concept plants, but in the commercial market soybeans and cotton have a bigger scale – there are more acres to transform, and as a result, more impact.” Their acquired funding is going to go towards accelerating their business and getting InnerSoy and InnerCotton onto the market.
InnerPlant is set to revolutionise the farming industry with their recent and future breakthroughs in agriculture research. With products like InnerTomatoes available, the company is helping immensely with things such as food and company sustainability, as well as keeping food healthy with fewer pesticides.
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