Agtech startup FluroSat raises $4.6 million to help farmers grow better crops

Microsoft’s venture fund M12 led the investment alongside Costanoa Ventures, Space Capital, Artesian/GRDC GrainInnovate Fund, Artesian Clean Energy Seed Fund. Existing investors including the CSIRO’s Main Sequence Ventures, AirTree Ventures and Telstra’s muru-D also backed the raise.

The funds landed less than a year after the launch of FluroSat’s agtech platform FluroSense, which combines ag modelling and AI in an analytics engine that helps agronomists and farmers to assess plant health, detect crop stress and direct input applications. The analytics on automated data collection uses Australian crop science research to predict performance, offering scale and accuracy not previously available to farmers.

Just 10 months after launch, FluroSense is now used by more than 1000 farmers in eight countries to monitor nearly 11 million hectares of land. Sydney-based FluroSat now also has offices in Canberra, San Francisco and Kiev, Ukraine.

The business has partnered with prominent ag services such as  Landmark, Nufarm, MicaSense, TerrAvion and Iteris.

Founder and CEO Dr Anastasia Volkova said the latest cash injection, on top of $3 million in federal government grants, will be used to further improve agricultural yields in Australia as well as make FluroSat available to agronomists globally.

“Our agronomy customers help farmers to understand the past, act in the present and predict the future, but they can’t be everywhere at once. FluroSat’s mission is to scale their knowledge and science in a powerful, simple-to-use computing platform that keeps farms on track, in real time,” she said.

M12 Managing Director Samir Kumar said “computational agriculture will help the world feed 10 billion people in the future.

“FluroSat’s machine learning-powered FluroSense platform empowers agronomists with actionable insights so they can scale helping more farmers make the right decision the first time,” he said.

This post originally appeared on StartUp Daily and is republished here with permission.