Naspers Ventures has helped raise $22 million in a Series C round of funding for Michigan-based FarmLogs to invest in technology that will help farmers manage their farm activities effectively, efficiently and profitably. With this inflow, it will also increase its staff strength to cater for its increasing operations
Drive Capital, Huron River Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners, SV Angel and individual investors including Y Combinator president Sam Altman joined in this Series C round.
The round brings FarmLogs’ total funding to $37 million since its launch in California in 2012.
According to Jesse Vollmar CEO and Co-founder, the company has invested heavily in satellite imagery and data since it graduated from the Y Combinator accelerator in 2012. It develops predictive models on top of that raw data to help farmers “program” their fields.
“We analyze fields all around the U.S. all season long. We can highlight and alert farms when we see a problem developing, and send them out to examine and fix things they never would have caught on the ground. It’s all thanks to a multi-year history of performance satellite imagery.”
Jesse mentions that with its new international investor, the company could look at expanding globally too. Though he is in no rush to expand overseas or to exit the business, explaining that his investors are patient, particularly Naspers.
FarmLogs started out in 2012 as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool to help farmers move away from spreadsheets, pen, and paper, and go online with an easy-to-use app.
Its products include FarmLogs Standard which provides free, easy-to-use tools that lead to quick and sound decision-making; FarmLogs Advantage which catches yield threats sooner, minimize uncertainty, and increase your margins and FarmLogs Prescriptions which is an easy way to farm based on the unique characteristics of your fields and FarmLogs Flow which is a hands-off approach to yield mapping
