July 24, 2019

by Lynda Kiernan

Microsoft’s venture fund M12 has led a A$4.6 million (US$3.2 million) round for Australia’s FluroSat, an agtech startup leveraging AI technology to improve agricultural yields. 

Costanoa Ventures, Space Capital, Artesian/GRDC GrainInnovate Fund, and Artesian Clean Energy Seed Fund also participated in the round, along with existing investors CSIRO’s Main Sequence Ventures, AirTree Ventures, and Telstra’s accelerator, muru-D.

Born out of the “Inventing the Future” course at the University of Sydney, and founded by Anastasia Volkova and Malcolm Ramsey, FluroSat employs remote sensing technology and hyperspectral cameras in conjunction with hand-held devices, drones, or satellites to closely monitor crop conditions, generating information that can be critical to agronomists and farmers. Images are analyzed to determine crop health, diagnose problems before they become  unmanageable, and to detect water or nutrition deficits, weed or pest issues, or heat stress.

In February of this year the company announced it had been awarded A$3 million (US$2.15 million)  in funding through the country’s Cooperative Research Centers (CRC) Program – the key program to manage Australia’s $29.9 million investment in AI for the period 2018-2022.

Together, the capital raised through these two rounds will be used by the company to further improve agronomic yields and to expand Flurostat’s availability to agronomists worldwide, with a particular focus on agronomists in the U.S., Canada, Argentina, and Brazil.

“Computational agriculture will help the world feed 10 billion people in the decades to come,” said Samir Kumar, managing director at M2. “FluroSat’s machine learning-powered FluroSense platform empowers agronomists with actionable insights so they can scale helping more farmers make the right decision the first time.”

Headquartered in Sydney, the startup has quickly grown to have offices in Canberra, San Francisco, and Kiev, Ukraine. And less than a year after FluroSat’s launch of its platform, FluroSense, the startup’s technology is being used by more than 1,000 users across eight countries, including Landmark, Nufarm, MicaSense, TerrAvion, and Iteris, monitoring 10.8 million hectares (26.7 million acres) of land.

“Our agronomy customers help farmers to understand the past, act in the present and predict the future, but they can’t be everywhere at once,” said Anastasia Volkova, founder and CEO, FluroSat. “FluroSat’s mission is to scale their knowledge and science in a powerful, simple-to-use computing platform that keeps farms on track, in real time.”

– Lynda Kiernan is Editor with GAI Media and daily contributor to GAI News. If you would like to submit a contribution for consideration, please contact Ms. Kiernan at lkiernan@globalaginvesting.com.