muru-D Company FluroSat Raises $1.5m

A big congrats to Flurosat, one of our SYD4 companies who have just raised a cool $1.5m!

FluroSat is a crop health monitoring startup which in just 12 months has gone from an idea to over $200k in revenue.

FluroSat is set to bring predictive decision support to the paddock, offering insights produced by adaptive crop growth models learning from experiments on the farm.

Investors in the round include CSIRO Main Sequence Ventures, AirTree Ventures and strategic agricultural investors lead by CRDC. Alongside the equity funding, Flurosat has successfully secured several grants with the help of Cicada Innovations and its GrowLab accelerator program.

FluroSat provides thermal and multispectral data that allows farmers to differentiate water stress from nitrogen stress. Using the FluroViewer platform, agronomists input the results from on-farm tissue testing to calibrate nitrogen maps to their paddock. FluroSat is gathering hyperspectral image datasets, which can identify crop stress down to specific nutrient deficiencies and early signs of disease. Farmers receive specific and customised yield prediction models using real farm data.

“We are most excited about the experienced investors supporting us, each reflecting major parts of FluroSat’s business: deep-tech, crop health science, data analytics, machine learning and direct connection to growers of high-value crops”, said founder and CEO Anastasia Volkova.

FluroSat is planning to invest the seed funding alongside recently awarded grants, to bring its novel technologies to a wider market. This summer FluroSat’s own FluroViewer platform is being tested by cotton agronomists and farmers to track the performance of their crops, and optimise their distribution strategy for fertiliser, water and pesticides. The seed funding will allow the company to open the platform to a wider Australian market mid-2018 and start trials in the USA. “Ultimately, FluroViewer will be the only tool of its kind to proactively suggest management strategies and allow users to evaluate the effect and the return of on-farm experiments at a sub-paddock level”, said Volkova.

FluroSat sees the future of agriculture in AI-assisted farming, where daily insights and suggestions gathered from satellite and weather data on a paddock level are served to farmers every morning. This will allow farmers to direct their attention to impactful decisions throughout the growing season and keep farmers aware about long-term changes to yield sustainability.

“Australia is a world leader in innovation for the agriculture sectors, tracing all the way back to CSIRO’s origins over 100 years ago”, said Michael Zimmerman, Partner at Main Sequence Ventures. “We are thrilled to be leading the investment in Flurosat, who are bringing together advances in remote sensing, machine learning and crop science to deliver a much-needed solution for industry. ”

“The future of farming is precision agriculture” said John Henderson, Partner at AirTree Ventures. “Identifying the perfect blend of water, fertiliser and/or herbicide on an individual plant-by- plant basis is a perfect challenge for computer vision and machine learning. The result will be hugely improved crop yields. We are excited to be supporting Anastasia and the Flurosat team as they build the toolset for tomorrow’s farmers. ”

Flurosat (www.flurosat.com) is a crop health monitoring startup that provides agronomists

and farmers with multi-use, actionable maps which help improve yields and reduce input costs.

Agronomists are using FluroViewer platform to calibrate nitrogen maps of their paddocks to determine where to sample crops, where to irrigate, where to level the field and how to redistribute fertilizer to improve ROI. FluroSat has recently been named the “Food/Agribusiness of the Year 2017” by the Australian Technology Competition and came runners up in the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Australia.