Finance-Accounting

There may be too many investors with little or no knowledge about the Ag space who are latching onto the latest investment craze. Will it backfire?

Bowery, an indoor farming company that deploys a lot of high-tech solutions – including propriety software systems, robotics and monitoring plants via machine learning – announces it has secured a Series A funding round of $20 million from several investors, including General Catalyst, GGV and GV.

At the very heart of agriculture is the drive to feed the world. AgTech is enabling farmers to do this more efficiently and effectively than ever, and major investors are watching closely.

Agtech startups have raised more than $320 million in 2017. That’s three times the amount raised over the same period in 2016.

Memphis-based AgLaunch Accelerator says it’s critical for agriculture to advance and adapt to keep up. With a fresh $50,000 investment, the group intends to put new technologies into farmers hands, faster.

The disconnect between those that are creating new innovations and the farm is dramatically lowering the probability of success for new agricultural ventures, which is in turn giving investors pause and is certainly not accelerating adoption quickly.

A ‘new agricultural revolution’ is brewing, and farmers are in the center of it.

Investment at record in 2015 and could expand this year, according to a USDA report.

You can sell quite a lot of things on eBay – but you can’t sell corn and soybean bushels. You can sell them on a website called FarmLead, however. The online grain marketplace, which was started in Canada in 2013, hopes to expand significantly in the U.S. this year.

AgLaunch, based in Memphis, Tenn., will be expanding its Farm-Centric Innovation Model to create agriculture businesses, attract investment capital, and enable farmers to participate in the innovation process.