Agricultural efficiency startup VitalFields has successfully raised a €250,000 seed investment from venture investors. The company focuses on increasing the productivity of farmers by offering a field based weather forecast, plan disease forecasting and farm efficiency analysis.
VitalFields said that their system is already used by hundreds of farmers in Europe. The investment will enable to deploy the solution in several new countries next year.
The company offers farmers precise weather data for their fields, along with focusing on things like disease forecasting, and providing tools to make it less labour-intensive for farmers to log more data from which the system can then provide those forecasts and conduct a “farm efficiency analysis”. This is potentially quite a big deal, since farmers, perhaps unsurprisingly, don’t always have access to or make great use of data, instead relying on less scientific practices.
“The success and productivity of farmers depends on a lot of different factors. It’s extremely hard to keep track of all disease and pest related information. This is why VitalFields is such a valuable tool for farmers,” says Mati Koppel, the Director of Estonian Plant Variety Institute and expert of plant diseases.
“We are currently building global pest and disease warning models. If we add weather forecasting to these disease models, we are able to warn farmers about plant diseases early and give advice on combating and preventing them. The result will be a higher yield for the farmer,” says Martin Rand, the CEO of the company.
VitalFields was started a year ago in 2011 at the international Garage48 hackathon and the team has also been through a very intensive business accelerator program Startup Wise Guys.
The seed round was led by SmartCap, the venture capital arm of Estonian Development Fund and included two Estonian early stage investors, Arvi Tavasti Valduse OÜ and Wiser Financial Advisors OÜ.
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Cover image by VitalFields.
