Ag-tech company SupPlant has closed a $27-million-funding round led by Red Dot Capital Partners with participation from Menomadin Foundation, Smart-Agro Fund, Mivtah Shamir, Deshpande Foundation, PBFS and Maor Investments. The round brings SupPlants’s total funding to more than $46m., which SupPlant intends to use “to accelerate its intention to digitally inform every irrigation recommendation on earth,” the company said in a statement.
The company operates in the field of precision agriculture, enabling farmers to improve yields, productivity and water use efficiency on a large scale. Its technology combines data collected from soil, plant, and weather sensors to understand and identify the main parameters affecting the optimal performance of plants.
Most recently, SupPlant launched a product that has served 500,000 maize farmers in Kenya over the last season – the device provides AI-generated farming insights and recommendations based on cloud-driven data analysis. SupPlant enriches its data analysis by referencing its plant database, which features accumulated data collected from 32 crops in 14 countries and covering growing conditions from arid regions of the Middle East to tropical conditions in central America.
“We plan to continue to develop our sensorless API product in order to help 98% of the farmers in the world fight climate change,” said Ori Ben Ner, CEO of SupPlant. “It is far superior from any common practice available and is built for the vast majority of farmers on earth – smallholders that can’t afford access to hardware, [advanced] technology and unique knowledge.”
“The funds raised in this round will allow us to invest in our new markets and open other markets as well,” said Ben Ner. The Israel-based company has taken advantage of the Abraham Accords and geopolitical changes in the region to enter the UAE and Morocco markets in the last year.
“We were impressed by SupPlant’s abilities and recent expansion into strategic markets,” said Atad Peled, principal at Red Dot. “We were also inspired by their goal: working with smallholder farms, who usually do not have access to ag-tech. Food security will be a major issue in coming years, and we feel certain SupPlant’s solution will have a stand-out role in it.”