Solfintec raises $60M to apply edge AI to farming
Solinftec, a Brazil- and U.S.-based farm management company, raised $60 million in a growth investment round led by Lightsmith Group to provide farmers with real-time agricultural data to improve decision-making and sustainability.
The company says it manages a total of 27 million acres in the U.S., Brazil, and Latin American countries, focusing on crops like sugarcane, soy, corn and cotton, and coffee, timber, and citrus. It boasts of providing its service to 85 percent of Brazilian sugarcane growers.
Solinftec’s digital agriculture platform primarily aids farmers with information to ensure more effective decisions around planting, spraying, harvesting, tendering, and sustainability through connection with farm machinery and an AI system called Alice.AI. The AI system is said to connect with sensors, computers, and displays to project real-time, in-field crop data, information about inputs, and weather conditions to farmers.
“Our mission is to give each farm a sustainable future, promoting the accessibility of technologies to producers and transforming agriculture into a more productive practice, while preserving the planet,” says Solinftec CEO Britaldo Hernandez. Solinftec says its precision-ag platform helped cut 680,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions from 2016 to 2021, which the company estimates is roughly the same as planting 30 million trees or electrifying 700,000 cars each year.
The $60 million funding was led by Lightsmith Group with participation from existing investors Unbox Capital and Circularis Partners, and several undisclosed investors.
The agriculture industry is hoping to reap the rewards from its inclusion of edge computing, IoT, and improved internet access in agricultural areas. Besides Solinftec, Summit SmartFarms and Atomation partnered up to provide smart technology that monitors equipment, environment, behavior, and health data for prescriptive and predictive analytics. The 5G Open Innovation Lab launched a development field lab for the agricultural industry. To ensure that access to these internet-driven smart technologies could be connected, the Rural Cloud Initiative was formed to connect rural America to edge security.
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Article Topics
data analytics | edge AI | Rural Cloud Initiative | Smart Ag | Solfintec | venture capital
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