Microbial science agtech giant Indigo Ag announced it has acquired satellite imagery and AI startup TellusLabs as it aims to enhance its capabilities in spaceborne agriculture insights.
A Living Map of the World’s Food Supply
Founded originally in Somerville, Massachusetts, only two years ago by by David Potere, PhD, and Mark Friedl, PhD, TellusLabs consists of a team of scientists, statisticians, and engineers employing satellite technology to track in real time, parameters such as field boundaries, crop types, planting and harvest dates, and overall crop performance. Then when integrated with the company’s AI capabilities, the platform can combine these insights with additional historical and weather data to infer the environmental impact of farming.
With this in mind, TellusLabs built Kernel, the company’s initial product able to gather insights on the global food system through monitoring daily crop progress and by forecasting global crop yields prior to harvest.
“Agriculture market participants have consulted weather data for a long time, but they’ve done relatively little with the quadrillions of data points of satellite imagery,” David Potere, PhD, co-founder and CEO of TellusLabs told GAI News prior to GAI AgTech Week 2017. “It’s not because of oversight – growers, traders, and producers are among the savviest operators in the economy – it’s because the technology hasn’t existed to convert that massive potential into insight. By providing software and analytics powered by remote sensing and weather data combined, we hope TellusLabs technology can super-charge this sector, not disrupt it.”
Having built a “living map of the world’s food supply”, TellusLabs’ platform and team of experts will enable Indigo Ag to expand the scope and precision of the data insights it offers growers, while reducing risk and increasing yield potentials, boosting transparency, raising profitability, increasing environmental sustainability, and improving consumer health.
“At Indigo, we are always looking to expand and improve our offering to growers,” said David Perry, CEO, Indigo. “TellusLabs’ technology will bolster our effort to produce rigorous and useful agronomic recommendations tailored to each acre of a farm. And the team behind the technology is fundamentally aligned to our mission.”
Making its Move
This announcement follows closely upon Indigo breaking yet another record funding round in September when the company closed on a $250 million Series E backed by both new and existing investor including Baillie Gifford, Investment Corporation of Dubai, the Alaska Permanent Fund, and the company’s founder Flagship Pioneering. This latest round brought total funding for the company to $650 million.
As the company’s funding continues to grow, it is evolving and expanding beyond its work developing microbial products that increase crop yields, to add services that will see it become a full-service digital platform for farmers.
In conjunction with this round, Indigo also announced the launch of Indigo Marketplace – a digital platform designed to connect farmers directly to buyers, allowing them to transact for commodity crops at no cost. Buyers also are able to source grain with specific factors in mind, such as protein content, variety, milling quality, organic, non-GMO, and rain-fed, and in turn, farmers will be able to price their grain based on its identifying factors of their crop and how it was produced. Furthermore, Indigo facilitates grain quality testing, transportation, and payment through the platform.
Tellus About It
The cutting-edge microbial products developed by Indigo have been proven to increase resistance to drought, nutrient use efficiency, and crop yields. However, through its partnership with TellusLabs, Indigo will gain a better understanding of growers’ land characteristics and yield potentials. And with the spatial insights gained through TellusLab’s technology, Indigo’s agronomists will be able to make better recommendations to growers, while also being able to deliver high-quality, sustainably grown crops to the right buyers.
“We imagine the combination of satellite data and machine learning providing a spectrum of insights to growers — from the past, in the present, and for the future of their farms,” said Geoffrey von Maltzahn, co-founder and CIO, Indigo. “Understanding each field on its own terms, identifying the features that make them unique, and predicting the best products and growing practices for every acre of land are tricky, nebulous agricultural questions. With Indigo’s acquisition of TellusLabs, a farmer looking to grow his or her best crop can receive personalized data and recommendations that change the course of a growing season for the better.”
For TellusLabs, the tie-in with a leader such as Indigo, will advance the work that the company has put into developing its platforms over the past years.
“Joining Indigo will allow us to strengthen and expand the scope of the agricultural intelligence platform we have spent years building, while making a significant impact with constellations of satellites orbiting our planet,” said Potere. After working with Indigo for the past year, it’s clear to me that their team is uniquely positioned to harness that platform for the benefit of growers, buyers, and consumers around the world. We look forward to integrating our satellite imagery and machine learning technologies with Indigo’s deep agronomic expertise and their fast-growing, farm-scale databases to help farmers sustainably feed the planet.”
-Lynda Kiernan