January 31, 2018

BlockGrain, an Australian agtech-blockchain startup, has raised the equivalent of approximately $1 million in cryptocurrency from the $90 million NEM Blockchain Investment Fund.

Located on Australia’s Gold Coast and founded by Caile Ditterich, a fifth-generation farmer, in 2014, BlockGrain is an agricultural supply chain tracking company. Through its integrated logistics platform, the startup provides greater transparency to grain farmers, helping them determine grain quality, connect with global markets, better navigate the supply chain, and improve margins.

“BlockGrain was created with the mission to solve real life problems faced by the agriculture industry today,” said Ditrich. “We know that the complexity of the supply chain coupled with lack of meaningful information and data result in major efficiency and productivity issues for our farmers, brokers and logistic companies.”

In the Beginning

In March 2017 the company secured $95,000 in funding from the $420 million Advance Queensland Initiative, which was used to fund the acceleration of the development and commercialization of their technology.

“The funding, provided in March 2017, will assist BlockGrain with enhancing the technology’s intellectual property protection, full integration of the platform with a handheld device and marketing it to new customers,” said The Honorable Leanne Enoch, Minister for Innovation, Science and the Digital Economy and Minister for Small Business, in a government statement made in August 2017.

At the time, nine grain brokers, each with up to 100 clients, were trialing the platform.

“It is an exciting time,” said Ditterich last August. “We will soon be releasing our logistics platform, which will allow growers and logistics companies to track all grain movements throughout the supply chain at the touch of a button, removing all related paperwork. Without Advance Queensland Ignite Ideas funding, we simply would not be where we are today.”

Next Steps

The structure of the NEM Blockchain Investment Fund does not fall into typical parameters, explained ITWire, based instead on somewhat of a crowdfunding style, with potential companies pitching their business on forums, with community members voting their approval to advance the company to the attention of the NEM.io Foundation which then conducts the necessary due diligence before awarding an investment.

Dittrich states that BlockGrain will use the funds raised to integrate its technology platform with NEM’s blockchain technology.

“We’re at a stage now where we’re ready to investigate the potential application of blockchain into our platform,” Dittrich told ITWire. “We’re looking at NEM’s technology to help us automate and provide greater visibility within the agriculture supply chain.”

Jason Lee, director of global partnerships & strategic alliances for NEM sees a good fit with BlockGrain as well. “We have been looking for a company with real use cases and BlockGrain is a natural fit,” Lee told SmartCompany. “This team is clearly on a mission to succeed. Their business model and platform are a perfect match for the core features of NEM blockchain.”

Around the Block

Blockchain has already made noticeable headway in various ag sectors, with Louis Dreyfus being the first global trader to complete a total blockchain-based grain transaction for a cargo of soybeans being shipped to China.
Filament, which has offices in Reno, Nevada, Denver, and San Francisco,
and which is a product of the Techstars accelerator program, raised $5 million in Series A funding in 2015, and in March 2017 raised $15 million in new venture financing, to advance TAP, a platform used for the purpose of sharing soil data from a particular field among farmers.
California-based Skuchain also has developed a blockchain platform for barcodes and RFID tags designed to prevent counterfeiting which has already being applied to the agriculture industry.

More recently, Earth Twine, a collaborative technology company dedicated to bringing leading-edge technologies to bear on traditional food supply chains, and Stratis, a developer and provider of end-to-end blockchain solution applications, partnered to launch The Earth Twine-Stratis Platform, the world’s first blockchain platform dedicated to the seafood industry.

In effect January 1, 2018, the Seafood Import Monitoring Program now requires U.S. importers of record to provide and report key data ranging from the point of harvest, to entry to the U.S. market for the most highly vulnerable species of seafood including abalone, Atlantic Cod, Blue Crab, Dolphinfish, Group, King Crab, Pacific Cod, Red Snapper, Sea Cucumber, Sharks, Shrimp, Swordfish, and five species of tuna.

The availability of the Earth Twine-Stratis Platform will provide a solution product that will enable all stakeholders in the seafood industry supply chain to more easily comply with these new regulations.

-Lynda Kiernan