We will consider, in this article, some agritech companies to look out for around the world in the year 2024.
By Oyewole Okewole
Agricultural technology has evolved in different forms to tackle unique challenges. Their roles in revolutionalising agriculture cannot be over-emphasised, with many more technology-enabled solutions emerging across the globe. Most of these solutions have grown to enable business operations for many organisations. The companies navigate through different sectors in agriculture to introduce and progressively establish innovations. Their solutions are manifested in different areas such as farm data and analytics, drones and sensors, artificial intelligence, livestock farming technology, robotics, information accessibility and dissemination, supply chain optimisation, infrastructure and hardware, biotechnology, and many others.
In view of this, many agritech companies have painstakingly navigated through the dynamics of agricultural practices and are gradually consolidating, expanding, and in some cases, launching into other new areas. We will consider, in this article, some agritech companies to look out for around the world in the year 2024. The list is, however, inexhaustible, but these are some of the selected few based on their innovation, operations, and projected impact.
1. Robocare, Tunisia
Robocare was launched in 2020 in the Tunisian town of Sfax. The company provides solutions in the form of precision farming services that use data from satellites, drones, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The company specialises in using spectral imaging technology (an imaging technique that analyses a wide spectrum of light across the electromagnetic spectrum) and AI for agricultural purposes. Using a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model, the startup offers its tech-enabled farming tools at a competitive pricing which enables easy access to farmers across various scales. The business model therefore drives their adoption rates and increasing market niches. The 35-year-old founder, Dr Imen Hbiri highlighted that ‘These drones are used to help farmers combat the impacts of climate change and reduce costs, crop losses and water consumption’. Using these technologies, the startup offers agronomic (i.e. relating to the science of soil management and crop production) solutions that can monitor crops, prevent stress, control plant requirements, improve land efficiency, and optimise pesticide needs. It is a fast-growing agri-tech company in Tunisia. As part of the African Startup Watchlist for 2023, the company plans for expansion to other regions in North Africa as its operations strengthen in 2024.
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2. Aerobotics, South Africa
Aerobotics is an agritech company that holds promising results for the future of Africa’s economy. Established in 2014 in Cape Town by James Paterson and Benji Meltzer, the startup solely focuses on providing insights to farmers using advanced aero robots, namely drones. End-users of their solutions get exclusive access to satellites. The company dispatches a drone pilot to every registered farmer’s field to track crop growth, tree health and plant size in the field at regular intervals throughout the season. Farmers can access satellite data and high-resolution drone images to efficiently manage their farmland via their custom-built Aeroview InField mobile app.
Furthermore, the organisation provides tree-specific insights with information on tree count, size, health and chlorophyll levels. The solution can also provide fruit-specific information from high-resolution imagery (fruit detection, size, and colour), which is critical in predicting yield and, ultimately, profit. Besides serving African farmers and beyond, the technology has been adapted to the U.S. crop insurance market, providing insurers with key elements for their inspection process and loss adjuster reporting such as acreage, tree counts, missing trees and canopy area to determine a tree’s age. The company recently partnered with Zespri for a National Crop Estimation Project through the Innovation Fund. This indicates Aerobotics’ expansion and client base in 2024.
3. AFEX, Nigeria
AFEX, founded, by Ayodeji Balogun in 2014, is a Nigeria-based agricultural commodities exchange platform. Their Africa Exchange digital platform for trading commodities is transforming the commodities space in Africa by enabling commodities market players to meet and interact both in the physical and financial markets. According to the founder, the organisation has three main businesses all solving the same problems around access to agricultural markets, but with different approaches. AFEX Fair Trade Limited engages in business operations from buying commodities from smallholder farmers, before aggregating and selling to larger buyers. It also provides services to help farmers access agricultural markets. AFEX Investment Limited raises and distributes capital to help grow commodity supply chains. AFEX Commodities Exchange is an online agricultural commodity exchange platform that connects producers and buyers in Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda. Products listed on the exchange include maize, rice, sorghum, soya, wheat, cocoa, cashew, ginger, and sesame seed.
Their recent expansion drive for 2024, through the British International Investment’s (BII) $26.5 million investment that was achieved towards the end of 2023, will be used to drive structural improvements in Africa’s agricultural industry. Specifically, the investment will be used to build 20 modern warehouses in strategic locations in Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda to provide an additional 230,000 MT storage capacity, scale warehouse technology, and next-generation software that captures post-harvest pricing, and develop a soybean processing plant in Ibadan, Nigeria, and a drying facility in Uganda.
4. AgroStar, India
AgroStar is one of India’s foremost AgTech start-ups, working on the mission to help farmers win. The company developed India’s largest agri-advisory centre, with over 5 million users through their Agrostar app. It was established in 2013 in Pune, Maharashtra, India, by founders Shardul Sheth and Sitanshu Sheth. The technology-enabled solution is an end-to-end solutions provider that is solving three major problems of farmers: no access to good quality agri inputs, the gap in knowledge and information due to traditional farming, and lack of access to the best markets to sell their produce. The company provides real-time agronomy advisory and access to quality farm inputs, through AgroStar’s omni-channel platform.
AgroStar has enabled farmers to grow better quality crops, increase their yields by 30-100% and reduce expenses. AgroStar is helping farmers significantly by helping them increase their crop yield and productivity, reduce their input expenditure, help grow better quality output and sell their produce in domestic and global markets that offer a better rate while in the process building a full-stack model that is solving farmers’ problems end to end. The company doubled its business operations in the financial year 2023 and increased offline stores for Indian farmers. According to CFO Ritesh Alladwar, they intend to continue with this expansion drive till 2024 to drive more impact by expanding their range of products for the export market and the domestic market.
5. Beewise, Israel
Beewise offers autonomous beehives that operate with minimal human intervention by way of AI-powered precision robotics. The company’s solution automates all beekeeping activities to increase yield, reduce colony loss, and eliminate the use of chemical pesticides. Beewise is a comprehensive solution that aims to keep bees alive despite all the stressors and challenges they face, allowing them to thrive, pollinate, and produce honey.
The company was founded in 2018 in Isreal by Saar Safra, Hallel Schreier, Eliya Radzyner, Yossi Sorin and Boaz Petersil. Beewise developed the Beehome, a solar-powered, converted container that brings together robotics, artificial intelligence, imaging, a software platform, and a mobile application to monitor and care for honeybees around the clock. The device can house up to 24 bee colonies and automatically control for climate and humidity conditions, detects and eliminates pests and parasites, identifies when a colony is preparing to swarm, sends alerts when human intervention is needed, and even harvests the honey the bees produce. As the pioneer in the industry, Beewise is the only provider in the market as of 2023 that offers a robotics beehive to treat bees in real-time, allowing them to survive modern stressors according to Agrifutures Evoke. The projected expansion drive in 2024 is unprecedented as they intend to expand from 3,000 connected hives to 10,000, servicing more beekeepers while expanding their operations according to the co-founder Eliyah Radzyner.
(Read also: Increase Productivity in 2024: 10 Agritech Tools for Farmers in Africa)
6. The Gaia Project Australia, Australia
Gaia Project Australia (GPA) was founded in 2017 by Nadun Hennayaka in a bid to support research and development needs in renewable, cleaner oceans and to advance farming sectors. In 2019 the company decided to focus on Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), specifically leafy greens, hoping to identify and provide solutions that will fight climate change. GPA’s Intelligent Crop Cultivation Module (ICCM) is revolutionising the industry by reimaging how space can accommodate the growing needs of a plant.
The company has been working on a novel crop cultivation solution to increase efficiency while reducing operating costs in the CEA sector since 2019. GPA realises the importance of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals as a pathway to combat climate change, and CEA provides a closed-loop solution that guarantees safe, nutritious food security, but requires a sustainable business model to be successful. The Gaia Project Australia has also developed a novel system for indoor growing.
According to Agfunder, Nadun Hennayaka, ‘The most advanced way of growing [specialty] crops is transplant. ‘You use different tunnels or boards to grow plants to a certain age, and then move them to another platform. In many cases this is done with robotics — but at great cost.’ Using robots for the transplant operations is very expensive and on the other hand, human labour for transplants presents other problems, including finding enough labour and grappling with contamination. “If you use humans for transplant, you can’t control what they do outside.” Gaia’s solution is not to select robotics over humans, but to eliminate the need to transplant in the first place. GPA is recognized by NASA and the Canadian Space Agency as a Phase Two Winner of the prestigious Deep Space Food Challenge while helping them to develop a prototype and commercial pilot program operations; they project to be the leading organisation in producing leafy vegetables. They are planning to be well-established in 2024 and expand to the United States of America and India.
7. Hexagro Urban Farming, Italy.
Hexagro is a product-service platform aimed at increasing the adoption of urban agriculture, offering automated indoor verticals to companies, as a free loan high-tech system and low-tech modular vertical gardens for end consumers. The company was founded in 2016 by Felipe Hernandez Villa-Roel.
Hexagro develops modular soilless gardens that grow fresh, pesticide-free and nutritious greens efficiently and customer services to guarantee the best harvests to empower our community of urban farming advocates. The company is building its urban farming platform founded on 3 key pillars: IoT-connected, modular and automated vertical farms, digital services for service partners and a community of clients to make urban farming easy for all, a more pleasant experience, and social acceptance.
The company aims to build decentralised urban farmers’ communities that are empowered by their platform to establish resilient food systems. The decentralised communities will also help improve people’s wellness and well-being by reconnecting people to nature, connecting people to food and people to people through urban farming.
The technology and know-how developed by Hexagro are transferred to social projects to empower disadvantaged farming communities around the world. Towards the end of 2023, the company launched Clovy- the ultimate innovative IoT vertical garden with a digital cultivation assistant that teaches how to grow to customers and also helps to offer access to healthy food at home. According to Agritech Tomorrow, Clovy can grow up to 40 plants through hydroponic fertigation methodologies and low-pressure aeroponics.
8. Deep Agro, Argentina.
Deep Agro is an artificial intelligence-powered agtech startup founded by Juan Manuel Baruffaldi, Juan Ignacio Cavalieri, Juan Ignacio Cornet, Iván Regali, and Marcos Mammarella. The company’s core technology is cameras on sprayers that differentiate crops from weeds, optimising treatment and reducing the need for agrochemicals. This innovation led to Deep Agro’s recognition at the Zurich Innovation Championship in 2020, highlighting its effective use of AI in agriculture. Deep Agro aims to be a key player in AI solutions for agriculture while the use of generative AI for weed detection is utilised.
The company developed artificial intelligence to apply the agrochemical only in the right place and not over the whole lot with a profound effect of contaminating the crop. This permits the farmer to grow crops that are less contaminated with chemical residues, and quality and significantly save one of the most important costs of their productive activity.
Founded in 2017 and based in Casilda, Santa Fe, Deep Agro is gearing up for a strategic expansion into Brazil and, subsequently, the United States. The company aims to revolutionise agricultural practices using AI technology to minimise agrochemical usage. Deep Agro raised $2 Million towards the end of 2023 as reported by Contxto to advance AI in agriculture and also enhance their expansion projections.
9. Agro Smart. Brazil
AgroSmart is a platform for farmers and agribusinesses that allows agriculture companies to plan work, optimise resources, reduce costs and increase income. AgroSmart gathers information from various sensors about yields and uses artificial intelligence and data sciences tools. The corporate-backed startup notifies more than 100,000 farmers in Latin America while monitoring about 48 million hectares and processing over 10 billion datasets.
Agrosmart product helps these farmers to adopt climate-smart agricultural practices while advocating for the sector to become more resilient against all the economic and social setbacks experienced in the industry according to Co-founder and Chief Executive, Mariana Vasconcelos. The startup’s technology relies on soil sensors that are implanted into the ground, as well as drones and satellite images that collect information on the soil type and microclimate of each field.
This harvested data is then placed into AgroSmart’s algorithm, providing recommendations to farmers through every step of the planting chain including seed placement and sustainable practice guidance. In addition to working with farmers, Agrosmart has created another digital platform that helps corporations benchmark and track the sustainability of their supply chain. Leading organisations like Cargill and Coca-Cola have become major customers of Agrosmart to monitor their farms and products. Agrosmart launched Nexus during the COP 28- The United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Dubai towards the end of 2023. Nexus is a solution designed to convert data into insights and analysis for informed decision-making. Nexus is projected to play a very important role as the company expands and grows in 2024.
10. Indigo Ag, USA
Indigo Ag is the premier sustainability partner in the agritech industry. It is the first company to produce registry-issued carbon credits from agricultural soil at scale. The company is the innovative leader in sustainable agriculture, uniquely leveraging science and technology to turn sustainability into value for farmers, agribusinesses, and corporations. Their integrated business platform allows each player in the agricultural supply chain to simultaneously adopt and profit from their sustainability efforts. According to Indigo Agriculture, they are the only company offering corporations high-quality agricultural carbon credits and scope 3 emissions reductions at scale.
It was founded in 2013 as Symbiota by Noubar Afeyan, David Berry, Geoffrey von Maltzahn and Ignacio Martinez. The company is operating across 14 countries and aims to comprehensively deliver on its mission of harnessing nature to help farmers sustainably feed the plant. In 2024, Indigo Ag’s proven scope 3 is expected to double its impact. According to the company, the Market + source program that includes corn, wheat, rice and cotton will be expanding to new crops in 2024.
11. Bird Control Group, Netherlands
Bird Control Group is dedicated to contributing to yield improvement, food safety (compliance) and safe operations by solving the customers’ bird problems in a cost-efficient and innovative manner. The company utilises laser bird repellant systems that provides safe and continuous bird repelling. The company provides products that keep birds at a safe distance away from properties; farms especially grain farms while reducing bird pressure between 70 and 99 percent. BCG therefore provide solutions that is not limited to agriculture but in many other sectors like aviation, oil and gas, ral estate, recreation, pest control, etc. They are currently operating in more than 75 countries around the world.
They ultimately provide facility managers with an animal and environmentally-friendly solution to minimise safety risks and contamination on their site by reducing the number of birds present.
Bird Control Group is situated in Delft, the Netherlands and was founded by Steinar Henskes after he discovered that birds feel physically threatened by green laser beams that are used for surveying according to the CEO Rik Bakker. The company provides its clients with automated and manually operated lasers, the options available largely depend on the situation of the client. The company’s has created a strategic marketing plan for 2024 to drive their innovation to other continents to continue to lead and pioneer solutions in this regard.
12. Semios, Canada
Semios is an AgTech startup that provides dedicated crop management solutions for the agricultural industry. It offers a patented system of in-crop wireless networks attached to remote sensors, pesticide monitoring, and adjustable biological pesticide control. The data collected is provided to the cultivator in an interface that enables the reduction of agricultural inputs and increase the quality of the crop produced. Semios is an all-in-one Crop Management Platform for tree fruit, nuts, and vines.
It was founded by Michael Gilbert in 2010. The company has since grown into an industry leader in combating pests without pesticides. They have installed millions of sensors in fields around the world.
In 2023, the company launched Nelson TWIG® Beta for Automated Irrigation Control with partnership with Nelson Irrigation- a world leader in manufacturing automated irrigation control equipment for agricultural and industrial applications. With this product, Semios hope to evolve into a more rapidly growing market in water and irrigation in Agriculture while expanding their operations in 2024.
Oyewole Okewole. Agricultural Project Development Specialist.
Cover Photo: iStock
