Food securityAgTech innovator raises $7.5 million to help develop precision agriculture

Published 9 May 2017

Today, the Ag industry loses more than $300 billion each year due to crop diseases and pests. Pests and diseases can destroy crops and devastate farmers’ agricultural yield, but chemical overuse comes with its own set of challenges, including pesticide-resistant disease strains. Meanwhile, rising temperatures and increasing levels of carbon dioxide create more challenges for farmers as crop pests and disease thrive in hot, CO2-rich environments. Taranis, a precision agriculture intelligence platform, announced it has closed a $7.5 million Series A round of financing. Taranis says it aims to lead the digital farming revolution by giving farmers around the globe the ability to predict and prevent detrimental threats to their crops—and bottom line.

Taranis, a precision agriculture intelligence platform, announced it has closed a $7.5 million Series A round of financing led by Finistere Ventures, an AgTech venture specialist, and Vertex Ventures. Existing investors, Eshbol Investments, Mindset Ventures, OurCrowd, and angel investor Eyal Gura, also joined the round. With $9.5 million in total funding to date, Taranis says it aims to lead the digital farming revolution by giving farmers around the globe the ability to predict and prevent detrimental threats to their crops—and bottom line.

Finister Ventures says that today, the Ag industry loses more than $300 billion each year due to crop diseases and pests. Pests and diseases can destroy crops and devastate farmers’ agricultural yield, but chemical overuse comes with its own set of challenges, including pesticide-resistant disease strains. Meanwhile, rising temperatures and increasing levels of carbon dioxide create more challenges for farmers as crop pests and disease thrive in hot, CO2-rich environments, and farmers around the globe also need to prepare for the surge of erratic weather patterns and damaging extreme weather that can lead to crop losses exceeding 90 percent. Taranis is pushing farmers to rethink how they approach crop disease and pest control, as well as how they prepare for and address weather concerns — and helping them increase profits by more than 15 percent in the process.

“The way farmers farm may be slowly changing, but the surge in farm technology does not always equate to better, or easier, farming practices. Farmers of all sizes need better access to weather and field data, and Taranis offers an encouraging field monitoring platform, that is also affordable,” noted Brent Smith, vice president of proprietary technology and innovation at Agrium. “Taranis’ platform uses all existing data sources and precise, sub-millimeter imagery to accurately predict and alert farmers to upcoming crop threats. Taranis can also scale to include more proprietary prediction models as threats evolve, so farmers can make proactive in-season decisions to affect their crops before they suffer potential adverse effects.”