Ucrop.it, a digital platform that provides traceability and value to agriculture sustainable practices, announced that it raised $3.1 million in a financing round led by Yugen Partners and The Yield Lab Latam, among other.
These funds will help the agtech to expand throughout the region and to the United States. In the 21/22 crop year, ucrop.it registered one million hectares between Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. According to the company’s CEO and founder, Diego Hoter, this year they plan to reach five million hectares, including Brazil and the United States.
The company, based in Argentina, has developed a digital platform to record and map every production and agronomic event from planting to harvest, using blockchain technology. The resulting crop “dossier” becomes a key asset for a wide range of business applications such as input quality traceability, sharecropping and grain origination, growers’ trade finance, environmental compliance and sustainability impact, among others.
The key idea, which was born from a draft Hoter wrote in 2016 when he was working in the seed industry, is to record and trace the history of crops through blockchain technology, which allows confidentiality and security of information. Thus, they define the “potential sustainability of their crops, through environmental indicators such as EIQ (Environmental Impact Coefficient) and carbon footprint, to know to what standards they apply and continuously improve their impact on the environment,” he explains.
The next step is to connect them with actors in the value chain interested in recognizing sustainable practices. For this purpose, ucrop.it has meeting spaces “where producers can visualize all the agreements that apply to their crops and fields and the potential profit corresponding to these agreements”, says Hoter and adds: “there they can choose which agreements to sign, with which companies and for which fields and crops, in exchange for prizes and economic benefits”. The platform has 700 producers as users and has 16 clients, including GDM, Gensus, BASF and Surcos, among others.
“We want each farmer to convert sustainability efforts into greater profitability. That is why it is important to build strategic alliances with key players in the agricultural value chain, who will drive and enable the construction of a more sustainable agricultural ecosystem. This capital injection allows us to continue working towards this goal,” said Hoter.
The recent investment boost comes by W. Scott Stornetta, a partner at Yugen Partners/Harris Investment Group and one of the fathers of the technology that gave birth to cryptocurrencies and blockchain. He mentored ucrop.it in the firm’s Creative Destruction Labs Blockchain Stream program. Stornetta is a true celebrity in the crypto world as his work on digital documents from the early 1990s was cited by the enigmatic Satoshi Sakamoto’s paper, which is considered the basis for the invention of cryptocurrencies. Strictly speaking, it is still not known if Sakamoto exists or if he is a pseudonym under which other scientists hide. But what is certain is that Stornetta does exist and, in fact, Hoter cannot forget the day when in a Toronto office this expert gave his approval to invest in ucrop.it.
According to a statement released by the firm itself, “ucrop.it is a company that has built a strong case for adding value using Blockchain to solve the differentiation found between conventional commodity crops and climate-smart commodity crops in a decentralized, digital and scalable way.”
The other investor, The Yield Lab Latam is a venture capital firm, which invests in food technology companies in Brazil, Chile, Peru and Argentina.