July 19, 2016

Syngenta Ventures, the venture capital arm of Syngenta AG, and Cultivation Capital have led a $1.2 million round of fundraising for agtech startup, S4. Additional investors included in the round are Biogenerator, SixThirty Accelerator, The Yield Lab and other unnamed investors.

Originally founded in Argentina, S4 moved to St. Louis in 2015 when it participated in the 2015 class of agtech accelerator, The Yield Lab, before joining and finishing the Spring 2016 class of fintech accelerator, SixThirty.

Headed by CEO, Diego Steverlynck, S4 provides agricultural risk management solutions by leveraging advanced data analytics and aggregating data from both public and proprietary sources. The data is used to deliver actionable information that is highly correlated to crop yields to financial, agribusiness, and farming clients.

“We see enormous traction and potential in S4’s technology,” said Cultivation Capital Managing Partner, Brian Matthews. “Watching them acclimate to the St. Louis startup scene is promising and we are thrilled to invest in their continued growth.”

This round of funding for S4 will be used by the company to fund the improvement and expansion of its database processing capabilities, to develop sales in Argentina and Brazil, to  bring part of the company’s founding team to St. Louis, and for general working capital. The fund raise follows a previous $1.2 million round the startup raised from BioGenerator, the investment arm of BioSTL, in December 2015.

“This round of financing is a critical milestone in S4’s history,” said Steverlynck said of the most recent fund raise. “We are very happy to have found such a great team of institutional investors and we feel very much at home in St. Louis.”

Syngenta Ventures has been one of the more dynamic global investors in the agriculture space. Since 2006 the fund has invested more than $100 million in “innovative companies with novel technologies or business models that are led by outstanding management teams,” spread across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia according to its website.

—

Lynda Kiernan