Greece’s Centaur Analytics Raises $1.3M Seed Round

September 29, 2016

Centaur Analytics, an agtech IoT startup located in Volos, Greece has raised a seed round totaling $1.3 million led by Jerusalem-based crowdfunding platform, OurCrowd, through its OurCrowd First fund, and including the Greek Piraeus Jeremie Technology Catalyst Fund and angel investor, Avi Reichental.

Centaur Analytics’s goal is to dramatically reduce post-harvest crop loss and eliminate waste along the entire agricultural and food value chain through its proprietary wireless sensors and cognitive services platform for monitoring and protecting crop in post-harvest storage.

“The protocols and storage principles for maintaining quality of stored agriproducts have not changed much over the last 150 years, which is quite remarkable given 21st century food safety advances and concerns for a growing world population,” said Yori Nelken, General Partner at OurCrowd who joined the board of the company as part of the investment.

Centaur’s full-stack cloud platform, proprietary wireless sensors, and cognitive predictive and prescriptive analytics modernize these protocols by enabling real-time monitoring of the quality of stored agricultural goods and commodities, indicating the need for precision fumigation, if called for.

“We are proud to partner with the team at Centaur to significantly improve safety and reduce global losses of hard-earned agriproducts by bringing modern IoT and cognitive systems into this ripe-for-disruption space,” said Nelken, adding, “OurCrowd is committed to seed and scale disruptive AgTech companies that are focused on securing the world’s food supply.”

Israel-based OurCrowd launched its specialized $10 million, global, early stage, OurCrowd First fund in June 2015. The fund, which will be managed by general partners, Eduardo Shoval and Yori Nelken, will focus on seed and Pre-A Series investments with the goal of building a portfolio of 20 or more seed-stage companies. To date, the fund has invested in 13 companies centered on technologies in the Internet of Things, big data for agtech, industrial energy, Augmented Reality, mobile infrastructure, 3D imaging, and digital radiology.

“Entrepreneurs want more than just checks, and we will roll up our sleeves and work closely with the early stage companies in our portfolio,” said Nelken. “Providing money to startups is only one part of the equation. We will help each of our companies, to build their management teams, construct, explore and test go-to-market strategies and introduce them to our full ecosystem of support, mentoring and business networks. It’s our secret sauce for generating winning companies.

Lynda Kiernan

 

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