New Zealand agritech start-up Cropsy Technologies has successfully raised $1.5 million in an over-subscribed capital raise to transform fruit growing.
In its first capital raise the award-winning ag-tech company Cropsy Technologies has raised $1.5 million in an over-subscribed round, ensuring it is perfectly positioned to commercialise its world-first AI-enabled crop vision system.
Cropsy unlocks the full potential of crops with its unique visioning technology that combines mobile, continuous and GPS-tracked high-definition image capture, with AI-enabled software to analyse crops and aid decision making for growers. Attached to a tractor and powered by the tractor battery, the Cropsy vision system sees and understands every single plant while a grower runs their daily crop operations, profiling every leaf, fruit, shoot, cane, and trunk in real-time as the tractor passes by. Eliminating sun, shadows, and reflections from the captured images preserves accurate colours and textures regardless of the time or weather.
The technology enables growers to identify pests and diseases early, for targeted spraying and reduced crop loss, as well as efficiently understanding crop growth and saving time for vineyard and orchard managers. It will boost sustainability goals for growers by ensuring resources are not applied when not needed.
The resulting maps can be accessed online and highlight areas of concern and patterns across the entire crop, so growers know precisely how their crop is performing and changing over time. This ‘digital twin’ empowers growers to achieve the previously impossible – understanding the performance of millions of plants at all times, day and night, delivering real-time, GPS-tagged data for insight-driven crop management.
Initially focused on grapevines and with an exciting product development roadmap, Cropsy will expand into apples and oranges. Outcomes for growers include:
- Early pest and disease identification for targeted spraying and reducing crop loss
- Identifying missing, slowing and dead vines to flag re-planting opportunities with unprecedented precision.
- Crop phenology – analysing bud, shoot, bunch and berry counts for yield estimation and canopy management
- Time-savings – a digital scout that assists vineyard and orchard managers
- Forecasting crop issues before they happen by analysing every variable in the growing operation.
Cropsy was founded by Leila Deljkovic and Ali Alomari, who met as engineering students at Auckland University. They were then joined by fellow co-founders Rory Buchanan and Winston Su.
Along the way, they have received R&D funding from Callaghan Innovation (CALLAGHAN) and AGMARDT, and received multiple awards, including two Fieldays innovation awards last year and winner of the TIN Top 10 Early stage companies. In 2021 Cropsy was accepted into two accelerator programmes – Startmate and Sprout.
Cropsy’s trial partners have included wine industry giants Pernod Ricard Winemakers and Indevin, and more recently Marisco Vineyards in Marlborough. With many customers in the pipeline, 2022 is set to be a year of growth.
The capital raise was led by Angel Investors Marlborough (AIM) as a strategic investor, given both its wine industry presence in Marlborough as well as significant other interests in agtech including orchard management and robotics. AIM is an early-stage angel investment group based in Blenheim with over 100 members. AIM has invested $17 million to date into 49 companies across New Zealand and occasionally overseas. Although sector agnostic, AIM has significant and growing interests in agtech, fintech and SaaS.
Angel Investors Marlborough lead investor Tracy Atkin says the highly successful seed round which reached $1.8 million in commitments but had to be capped at $1.5 million, reflects the level of interest and confidence there is in this young agtech company. Not only was the round over-subscribed but the rolling close was also completed two months ahead of schedule.
Tracy says it was a privilege to be able to lead this over-subscribed capital raise on behalf of Angel Investors Marlborough and help seed one of NZ’s next agtech super-stars.
“The demand from both investors to be part of this journey, and customers to sign-up to this world-leading technology, is testament to what has already been achieved and their potential for future growth.”
Main photo: (L-R) Ali Al-Omari – CEO, Rory Buchanan – CTO, Leila Deljkovic, COO, Woo Jin Kang – software engineer, and Winston Su – head of AI.
Pictured below: Angel Investor Marlborough lead Tracy Atkin.
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