Australian Agtech company FarmLab has raised $750,000 from Venture Capital firm Artesian Ventures and their GRDC backed ‘GrainInnovate’ fund, and private investors the Prove Group to scale-up it’s soil management platform in light of the increasing focus on Carbon Offsets.
Sam Duncan, CEO and cofounder, said ‘FarmLab’s mission is to help farmers sustainably manage their soil, and with the increasing focus on ‘carbon farming’ across Australian Agriculture, this is a fantastic opportunity to scale up our technology to support the wide-spread management of soil carbon.’
FarmLab, a software company that likens itself to ‘Xero for Soil’, was founded in 2017 by Sam Duncan and Shahriar Jamshidi as a mobile app that empowers farmers and their agronomists to collect, test and analyse information about their soil with greater efficiency and greater ease.
Through direct integration with soil testing labs across Australia FarmLab is able to increase the accuracy and reduce the cost of soil sampling over the long term, providing better insights around soil inputs and reducing the cost of one of the world’s major climate challenges; soil carbon measurement.
‘We now have over a 700 farms on the platform across 700,000ha of agricultural land, and are the preferred provider for several large agribusinesses and carbon developers across Australia. Our technology is helping to not only increase productivity, but to help reduce the cost for farmers to generate soil carbon offsets.’ explains Sam. ‘The funding will be used to further scale up our infrastructure footprint across Australia and New Zealand, integrating more testing labs and supporting the simplification of the Australian Clean Energy Regulators soil carbon measurement methodology.’
Rob Williams from Artesian Venture Capital, who led the round, said ‘Artesian and GrainInnovate are excited by the opportunity to invest further in FarmLab as the company moves to accelerate growth and scale-up its technology and infrastructure. Farmlab is positioned at the nexus of agronomy and sustainability and is solving one of the fundamental challenges in the measurement of soil carbon, a key component driving the uptake of soil carbon projects globally.’ GrainInnovate is a $50m VC fund established by the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) and Artesian to invest in startups to help drive the future profitability and sustainability of Australia’s grain growers.
William Evans from the Prove Group, said “ ‘We are excited to support an innovative local start-up that’s applying technology smartly to help farmers prepare for a low carbon future. Similar to Xero for accounting, FarmLab provides software that makes it easier for farmers and service providers to efficiently access soil data and make better decisions which will improve soil health and carbon profiles. We see this software and the supporting technology as only becoming more integral to good farm management and we look forward to supporting FarmLab as they develop world leading products for farmers here and abroad.’
Late last year FarmLab announced their #1million1billion mission to help 1 million farmers sequester 1 billion tonnes of CO2 by 2025. Over the coming year they hope to continue to expand that mission across farms in Australia and the US, and are working on pilot projects in India to support small-scale farmers benefit from the sale of carbon offsets.
October 29, 2021