February 20, 2019

FluroSat, an Australian agtech startup leveraging AI technology to improve agricultural yields, has been awarded A$3 million (US$2.15 million)  in funding through the country’s Cooperative Research Centers (CRC) Program – the key program to manage Australia’s $29.9 million investment in AI for the period 2018-2022.

FluroSat and its commercial partners – Agworld, a farm management software company, and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) – will match the funds awarded from the CRC, bringing the total backing to A$6.6 million (US$4.73 million).

Born out of the “Inventing the Future” course at the University of Sydney, and founded by Anastasia Volkova and Malcolm Ramsey, FluroSat employs remote sensing technology and hyperspectral cameras in conjunction with hand-held devices, drones, or satellites to closely monitor crop conditions, generating information that can be critical to agronomists and farmers. Images are analyzed to determine crop health, diagnose problems before they become unmanageable, and to detect water or nutrition deficits, weed or pest issues, or heat stress.

In January of last year the company announced it had raised A$1.5 million (US$1.07 million) in funding through a round including  CSIRO Main Sequence Ventures, AirTree Ventures, and the Cotton Research and Development Corporation (CRDC) of Australia. The startup had also secured a number of grants with the assistance of Cicada Innovations and its Growlab accelerator.

“We believe that receiving the actionable insights required to manage a farm should be as easy as viewing your morning news feed. Our goal is to give growers and agronomists the cues to make decisions that directly affect ROI,”  said Anastasia Volkova, co-founder of FluroSat at the time.

The latest funding gained through the CRC will be used by FluroSat and its partners to aggregate currently siloed, disparate agricultural data gathered across farms so that opportunities and trends can be better identified, and farmers can raise their productivity.

The company is aware that as AI and data science play a larger role in farm management, there is spreading concern among farmers over security and information protection. To that end, Volkova told Australian Financial Review that the company does not own or sell any primary data gathered from farms, rather it only owns the derivative data generated through its platform.

Indeed, the goal of the company is to augment, or “supercharge” the work being done by agronomists, not eliminate them.

-Lynda Kiernan