With Ireland punching above its weight in both the agri-food and technology sectors, the intersection of the two is often seen as the new Eldorado for entrepreneurs here. The Irish ag-tech space has already spawned established companies, such as farm software management developers AgriNet and HerdWatch. The next generation is now getting off the ground: The Currency spoke with entrepreneurs who have raised funds for agri start-ups in the past year or so.

Investors make a beeline for ApisProtect

Imagine you have hundreds of beehives scattered across large tracts of land, knowing that some of them, someday, will be in trouble and need your attention. Which ones? When? The only way to know is to drive around and check each individual hive until you find something wrong. 

Cork-based ApisProtect wants to change that, and has raised €1.5 million to develop the technology to do so. 

“We help beekeepers reduce losses and improve productivity in their hives using the internet of things,” said its founder Fiona Edwards Murphy. 

An electronics engineer, Edwards Murphy completed her PhD on hive monitoring at UCC and turned her research into a business through the college-supported incubator Ignite.

ApisProtect has been developing a sensor platform to measure temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, sound and movement inside a hive. “We use machine learning to translate that data into useful information for the beekeepers,” said Edwards Murphy. “We can tell beekeepers which hives are alive or dead, big or small, healthy or unhealthy. This directs where they can use their labour more efficiently.” 

The business model will be an annual service fee covering the cost of hardware over time – “farmers are allergic to upfront capex” – focusing on direct sales to large beekeepers.

In August 2018, ApisProtect raised €1.5 million seed capital in a round led by Atlantic Bridge’s Irish university fund and Finistere Ventures, the Silicon Valley ag-tech investor firm with a European office in Dublin. 

This also secured funds from Yield Lab Europe, US-based Radicle Growth and Enterprise Ireland.

With this initial equity, the company has been testing 200 monitors watching 10 million bees in the US, Ireland, the UK and South Africa. The current phase is “to train our machine learning for launch in the first quarter of 2020,” said Edwards Murphy.

ApisProtect’s key target market is California, where she said a small area producing 80 per cent of the world’s almonds depends on pollination provided by 2 million beehives moving there every spring. 

“Two thirds of beehives in the US spend February in California,” Edwards Murphy said, adding that the typical $200 fee per hive for pollination services had now overtaken honey as a source of income for US beekeepers.

With a new office in Salinas, California, ApisProtect’s team has grown from its three co-founders one year ago to 13 people today. Current funding will take it through product launch in North America, Europe and Oceania, where the manuka honey business is significant in New Zealand. “We’ll be going to series A in the future, but not yet,” said Edwards Murphy.

MicroSynbiotiX takes the jab out of fish vaccines

MicroSynbiotiX founders Antonio Lamb and Simon Porphy are currently in talks with a large animal health business in the US to further develop the Cork-based company, which is tackling the costly challenge of mass immunisation in aquaculture.

Porphy remains cryptic about who their potential partners could be. He stated that they do not have any developments that they can share with the public currently. Despite the mystery around their future, they’ve experienced a wealth of success. 

In early 2016, MicroSynbiotiX secured seed capital of €50,000 from start-up accelerator RebelBio. They also received business mentorship worth an extra €50,000. This got the company off the ground.

“The research project focused on developing genetic engineering tools to modify microalgae and use it as an oral drug delivery vehicle,” said MicroSynbiotiX chief operating officer and co-founder Porphy.

“As a result, we were able to patent the genetic engineering tools. Later we found out that the technology had a great product-market fit for the aquaculture industry,” he continued.

MicroSynbiotiX began to grab the interest of private investors and other organisations such as the Local Enterprise Office.

Winning the Blue Economy Challenge in Australia and Nutreco FeedTech Challenge in the Netherlands earned the company a total of €200,000 in prize money.

“We proposed a plan to develop the technology further and that required €1 million seed financing,” said Porphy. Alimentos Venture, Sean O’Sullivan’s SOSV, Yield Lab Europe and Enterprise Ireland participated in that funding round in 2017.

MicroSynbiotiX started product development and hired Dr Kwang-Chul Kwon. Kwon is now its chief scientific officer and has a background in plant-based oral therapeutics. 

The company now has eight staff, not including scientific business advisors. Plant molecular biologist Lamb, fermentation scientist Porphy and Kwon are based in Cork, while the rest are in its California office. 

They continued to raise just over $1 million in further funding from investment firms and angel investors and this has enabled them to continue product development and so-called challenge trials, which test the efficiency of a vaccine.

“Antonio and I were scientists with little or no background in starting a business. However, we were passionate scientists with a determination to develop a new technology,” said Porphy.

MicrosynbiotiX is now developing oral vaccines through the use of microalgae, which reduces the need for antibiotics in aquaculture and is an alternative to administering injections to each fish.

“While there is a wide range of injection vaccines for livestock, they are not always viable for the aquaculture sector,” said Porphy.

Although “injection vaccines are economically feasible in Norway, UK and Chile,” said Porphy, they are an issue in places such as Asia. Injections are less practical for farmers than an oral delivery system due to the cost of the drug and the labour that’s often needed for administration. They also need cold storage and transportation and may cause stress, lesions and infections in fish.

Vaccine injections can usually only be given when the fish reaches a certain size. However, pathogens could have developed in a fish stock from an earlier age. As young fish and shrimp usually eat similar substances to this particular microalgae, immunisation from a young age is easier to implement through MicroSynbiotiX’s freeze-dried freshwater microalgae.

Most vaccines sold on the market are for salmon, trout, or sea bass in Europe and North America, however MicroSynbiotiX is aiming to treat a range of aquaculture species.

“The shrimp industry is booming,” said Porphy. “There are no oral delivery strategies available to vaccinate or delivery therapeutic agents to shrimps. As a result, the shrimp industry is facing $1.5 billion worth of stocks losses each year,” he added.

Around 5 per cent of global aquaculture stock die due to disease outbreaks. However, the sector is also seeing unprecedented growth.

The World Bank has predicted that by 2030, more than 62 per cent of the seafood consumed on the market will be farmed. Yet, based on OECD estimates, the loss of fish stocks internationally due to bacterial, viral, and parasitic infections each year is large enough to feed over 90 million people.

TrueNorth gives farmers direction on grass

In June 2018, Shannon-based TrueNorth Technologies raised €500,000 to improve the manufacturing process of its Grasshopper plate meter, a connected device used by farmers to measure and analyse grass growth data. 

Director Paddy Halton acknowledged that the investment came at the end of a long process – but the company has been taking a cautious approach since starting up in 2015 with around €200,000 from family and friends, followed by a €12,500 feasibility grant from Enterprise Ireland. 

Halton told The Currency that TrueNorth’s founders decided not to seek venture capital, where amounts and administrative requirements were too large for the company. 

Instead, the development of the Grasshopper initially relied on collaboration with state agencies – first Teagasc, which Halton said was concerned with barriers to the adoption of grass measuring by farmers and the risk to the industry’s competitiveness, and initiated research and development work on the device. “They did not put money into it, but covered the cost of validation at Moorepark,” Teagasc’s research farm in Co Cork.

The first version of the Grasshopper was ready at the end of 2015, and Enterprise Ireland has since been TrueNorth’s main support, with an initial €50,000 investment into 10 per cent of the company’s equity in 2016. Further developments in software for grass growth analysis – “getting the data is only half the job,” says Halton – and hardware better suited to the harsh farm environment led to the launch of a second version of the Grasshopper in early 2018. 

At the same time, TrueNorth was seeking funding to invest in injection moulding tools that would cut its manufacturing costs – but hit a difficulty. Its competitor Monford Ag Systems, despite raising funds from investors such as Bank of Ireland, Glanbia and the Irish Farmers Journal’s publisher the Agricultural Trust, failed to commercialise its own connected Grassometer. Monford Ag Systems has since gone into liquidation. 

“They soured the investment community around grass measuring,” Halton said. “We found it very difficult to get around that year.” Support from Enterprise Ireland, both financial and advisory, proved crucial in keeping the company afloat, he said, despite lengthy procedures to access funding from the agency.

Highly seasonal spring and summer sales of Grasshoppers went by (at higher manufacturing costs) before TrueNorth could close a funding scheme under which Enterprise Ireland matched a €250,000 investment from a private investor.

Company filings show the business angel to be Kingbell Company, the investment vehicle of the Purcell family behind mining equipment manufacturer Minco, also based in Shannon. Despite the eight-month wait, “our investor didn’t let us down and took a shareholding in the company,” said Halton.

TrueNorth, which employs seven people, is now exporting to France and Germany, but is holding off on the UK because of Brexit and currency uncertainty. It is developing new connected products around grass quality measurement and analysis, and launched a low-cost livestock weighing system at this year’s National Ploughing Championships. “The farmer runs animals through a crush and all the information goes into a decision-support tool,” Halton said, before being cross-referenced with breeding data to assist with herd management planning. 

Banks back Beotanics

Pat Fitzgerald is the man behind Beotanics, which creates ingredients from niche crops such as wasabi and now yacón, a daisy-type plant known for its sweetness.

The Irish AgTech company will be a participant in a new EU project to develop alternative proteins, which will launch in January. 

The Smart Protein initiative will be funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 Project and will create alternative protein foods from plants, fungi and other byproducts. 

The aim of the project is to help build a more sustainable protein out of nutritious alternatives to meat. The concept of this initiative came from emerging environmental challenges including climate change and global food security.

It is expected that the first wave of products – including plant-based meats, fish, seafood, cheese, infant formula, and other dairy products, as well as baked goods, will go to market in or around 2025.

A total of 33 partners from industry, research, and academia across 21 different countries, including Ireland will collaborate on the project, which is led by the School of Food and Nutritional Sciences at University College Cork in Ireland. Collaborators include Fraunhofer, the University of Copenhagen, ProVeg International, Barilla, Thai Union, AB InBev and Beotanics. 

While Fitzgerald is the managing director of the company, it is a family business with a history going back to 1990. It started out as Fitzgerald Nurseries, which is the farm-based side of the company that became the Beotanics group and focuses on science and customer development.

“We’ve already raised our own funds,” said Fitzgerald when asked where he and his wife Noirin found the money to develop their business. All fundraising so far was “just between our banks and ourselves” and they have sold no equity in the company. “We’ve been investing continuously on an annual basis,” he added.

Future deals could be in the offing for Beotanics, as Fitzgerald said it is “likely in 2020 we will be going outside ourselves”. 

“We had a few approaches but for now we’re keeping to our own internal resources as a privately held farm-based agri-tech,” he said.

As the vegan industry rises, so does the popularity for Fitzgerald’s niche crops. Sweet potato was the first one he became interested in. He produces it at NativaLand, Beatonics’s sister company in Portugal.

Beotanics currently employs up to 60 people, 50 of them in Ireland. It has recruited more people from the food industry in recent times, including a former Kerry Foods executive,  as its focus shifts to producing ingredients used in powders, flours and syrups.

This is where the idea to plant yacón was born. The plant can be used as a sweetener but also a source of fibre. Currently, Beotanics has 1.5 hectares of yacón, a precursor to a possible 20 hectares.

“It’ll be for feeding to the snacks and drinks industry,” said Fitzgerald. “Currently in Ireland, we’re not dealing with any food companies, but we are talking to them,” he added.

Instead, Beatonics’s current customers are in the Middle East and Africa, in countries such as Morocco. The company also charges royalties around the world for the use of its products. Its biggest revenue streams come from Belgium, Holland and France.

Beotanics is now transferring its plants to its Stoneyford, Co Kilkenny headquarters. The company invested €1 million there this year as the lease was running out on its previous facility. Fitzgerald hopes to open this extension by January or February 2020.

Farm-to-fork green data from Farmeye 

Galway-based Farmeye, which focuses on soil quality and environmental traceability, is in the process of raising €1.2 million for its development, its co-founder Eoghan Finneran said.

The NUIG spin-out was formed in 2017 after receiving initial funding of €340,000 from Enterprise Ireland through the university, €50,000 from the State-backed National Digital Research Centre (NDRC) and €70,000 from its three founders – Finneran, software engineer Joe Desbonnet and scientist-cum-farm entrepreneur Brendan Allen.

“Farmeye to date has focused on soil analysis, management and software to help farmers save money and the environment,” Finneran said. Nutrient management in soils is a major environmental challenge for cattle farming, especially intensive dairy production. 

The company aims to develop “a whole set of sustainability metrics for food production,” Finneran said, with a chain of custody based on geolocalisation, barcoding and software to transfer this data from the field down the supply chain. “It’s primarily the dairy co-ops who are doing that: they want to be able to show it to their customers – baby formula manufacturers or supermarkets.” 

Finneran said Glanbia and Carbery group are already using Farmeye’s services to manage data from soil sampling in their farmers’ fields. In April, Farmeye opened a web-based service to manage nutrient management plans, a reporting obligation for the more intensive farmers and their advisers to comply with nitrates regulations. 

The company aims to reach the €1.2 million target in its current round of funding in the coming months. “Money is not as readily available as it was a few years ago, but it is there,” Finneran said, adding that some funding was already committed. The company is also preparing to enter Enterprise Ireland’s high-potential start-up programme.

Farmeye has engaged EY for business planning and expects to top €1 million in sales and employ 10 people within three years. This will involve expanding to a wider set of sustainability metrics and markets. 

“The products and services will be a platform for dairy co-ops, for example, to capture all farm-level data for sustainability metrics: soil nutrients, water, energy use and carbon footprint,” Finneran said. 

“This will give them a sustainability score that they can use to market, for example, a new low-carbon cheese, or pay farmers a bonus.” 

Farmeye also plans to move into European markets two to three years from now, then start providing services to the arable sector the following year.

The investor’s view

Nicky Deasy, managing partner at the Galway-based European branch of the global ag-tech accelerators network Yield Lab, said that the current wave of start-ups is focused on addressing sustainability and climate change in food production. “The industry has been focused on producing sufficient quantity of safe affordable food since World War II – and on convenience,” she said. “It will have to pivot rapidly to avoid doing damage to the environment while producing food that is still affordable.”

The Yield Lab Europe has invested in many of the companies covered here and provided them with business mentoring. “Our companies have technologies that tick the commercial boxes and the environmental objectives,” Deasy said. From €21 million currently, its investments are scheduled to grow to up to €50 million after a current funding round closing by year-end. Of around 100 applications for the Yield Lab Europe’s 2019 accelerator programme, Deasy said around 15 per cent were Irish. “Quality is good and increasing,” she added.

MicroGen Biotech continues to clean up

Crop health and food safety company MicroGen Biotech is looking to clean up not only the soil, but also a €6 million funding round from confidential investors. The agri-tech start-up based in Carlow also formed a partnership with a US company recently.

“Heavy metals is the biggest crisis” when it comes to crops, said company founder Dr Xuemei Germaine. 

She added that this problem is present in rice, wheat, cocoa and Irish potatoes. “The European Commission really wants to tackle this problem. It is really big and there’s no solution,” said Germaine. “In the last two years we found the problem got even bigger,” she said, especially when it came to food safety.

MicroGen Biotech applies constructed, functional microbiome technology to remove pollutants such as heavy metals from soil. This has a domino effect of increasing crop yield, soil fertility and food safety.

Originally from China, Germaine came to Ireland in 2001 to complete her PhD at Carlow IT on the topic of technology to improve soil health. However, she always wanted to start her own business.

After finishing her doctorate, she was hired by Pfizer. In her early thirties, she decided to quit her job in 2006 just as Ireland was crashing towards a recession. “I always wanted to do something that’s good for the environment but is linked to human health,” she said.

Germaine came from a family of entrepreneurs and her father encouraged her from a young age to follow the same path.

She recognised the demand for soil cleaning technology in China but also saw how it could be used in other regions. MicroGen Biotech was registered in 2012.

Initially, Germaine went to Enterprise Ireland and started the New Frontier programme to get her business started. Other convertible loan investments came from Yield Lab Europe and private investors from Singapore and the UK.

Carlow IT is the main shareholder of the company and is where a lot of the product research for MicroGen Biotech is conducted. Up until now, the company has raised €2 million from a variety of investors. They received equity investment from Enterprise Ireland and the Chinese company MineGreen. 

They also received the equivalent of €600,000 from the Chinese government as the company has operations in China as well as Ireland.

“Our business model outside China is more about partnership and licensing,” said Germaine. Like in its recent deal with a US company, MicroGen Biotech licences its product out to a particular region, targeting a specific market.

Expansion is on the horizon for the company, which is looking to increase its staff by 30 people in Ireland by the end of 2020.

MicroGen Biotech is an internationally recognised and award-winning start-up. In 2017 the company won the Thrive Sustainability award at the Forbes AgTech Summit in California.

MagGrow hopes to fund more growth

MagGrow is entering a new fundraising round to develop its crop health business further after spending €10 million in the past six years on research and development.

To date, the Dublin-based company has raised €14 million for research and product development. This included €3 million from new and existing investors in its latest round, which closed last November. Their names were not made public.

Brothers Gary and David Wickham founded MagGrow with business consultant David Moore in 2013. Its crop spraying technology uses the electromagnetic charge of molecules in liquids such as pesticides to control droplet characteristics. MagGrow claims to help farmers increase spraying coverage by 40 per cent and reduce drift by 70 per cent.

In Ireland, this product met a gap in the market as 70 per cent of pesticide spray does not reach a target plant.

MagGrow opened its own crop science centre at the Royal Agricultural University’s agri-tech innovation space, Farm 491, in Britain last year.

Since being established at the campus incubator NovaUCD, MagGrow has partnered with academic institutions such as Wageningen University in the Netherlands, where it has other partners and investors. The company also entered partnerships with Trinity College Dublin and Harper Adams University in England.

In 2017, MagGrow was selected for the Pearse Lyons Agritech accelerator programme. Other participants included MooCall (see below).

Hexafly spreads its wings

Co Meath-based Hexafly recently obtained licences to trade animal by-products and feed from the Department of Agriculture, while closing a third round of funding bringing the capital it has raised so far to €4.5 million.

Its business is to farm insect larvae, feed them food waste or inedible crops, and extract their nutrients. “Hexafly is a bioconversion company,” said its chief executive Alvan Hunt, who founded the business with chemist John Lynam. 

“It takes low-value feedstock, and insects convert those biomaterials into higher value products.” These include protein and oil ingredients for use in aquaculture, livestock and pet feed, and frass fertiliser. As fish stocks decline, Hexafly’s founders believe aquaculture will need alternatives to wild fish to produce its feed.

Hunt said the company closed a €2.2 million funding round this autumn, mostly among investors who had already participated in raising €1.1 million in 2017 and €1.2 million the following year. Those providing equity so far have included Enterprise Ireland, SOS Ventures, Yield Lab Europe, the all-island investor syndicate facilitator Halo Business Angels Network and the Cedas Foundation, an Isle of Man-registered organisation with undisclosed ultimate beneficiaries. All have come back through successive funding rounds, Hunt said.

From its initial base in Kells, Hexafly has expanded to a larger facility in Rathdrinagh near Slane where this year’s funding will be used. “It’s a scale-up of the production plant, and a further round in 2020 would be to expand to a second facility,” said Hunt. “From now, we’ll be looking at institutional investors.” The company currently employs 23 people and generates revenue, he added.

Obtaining licences from the Department of Agriculture was a long and difficult process, ending in a big milestone for the company. “It allows us to export to the EU and beyond. We can start bringing in revenue now,” said Hunt.

With markets in Ireland, the UK and continental Europe, he acknowledged exposure to Brexit. Although the company is used to export procedures, “the issue will be tariffs and quotas,” he said. Other upcoming challenges include expanding the team to manage production scale-up. “We’re moving out of that start-up phase,” said Hunt.

Leaving the start-up phase

Hexafly is now aiming to join a group of ag-tech companies that have moved past the high-risk fundraising phase, such as calving and cow heat detector manufacturer Moocall. “Now we’re profitable,” said Moocall’s co-founder and chief executive Emmet Savage. “It’s easier to go back to your investors. They see it’s probably the last round raising funds.” 

As it expands into new overseas markets, Moocall raised more capital in the past year, though Savage won’t give details of the latest contributions from its backers. Records over the company’s eight-year history show these have included Enterprise Ireland, Savage’s father-in-law Michael Smurfit and Irish Farmers Journal publisher the Agricultural Trust.

The farming newspaper provides another link to ag-tech developments in Ireland: it has partnered with Sencrop, a French start-up using connected sensors and the Sigfox long-range radio network, to provide real-time weather reports from 12 farms around the country. “The farmer can check what is happening in his field wherever he is, 24/7,” said Sencrop spokesperson Amber Ogborn. 

Sencrop raised $10 million in its series B funding round this year and has included Ireland in its current Europen roll-out plan, illustrating the country’s attractiveness as a market as well as a launchpad for ag-tech entrepreneurs.