Brazilian software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup BemAgro recently raised a $2.6 million pre-Series A round from CNH Industrial, Suzano Ventures, (the corporate venture capital arm of pulp producer Suzano) and ATVOS.
The raise follows a $1.8 million pre-Series A round from February that was also led by CNH and included participation from Rural Ventures, MMAgro, and Agroven.
BemAgro will use the new funds to continue development of its SaaS platform for agriculture, including a strategic move into the forest management sector.
Optimizing forest management through AI
BemAgro’s SaaS platform uses image processing with artificial intelligence and computer vision to monitor crops throughout their the growing cycle. Tools enable users to process data from tractors and drones to define planting, spraying and harvesting routes, detect weeds, generate variable-rate application maps and identify plant failures, among many other tasks.
“Our platform consolidates this data into a single place and we provide farmers insights, agronomic reports. Through that, we can help the farmer with better decision making and we are able to increase productivity and reduce costs,” says BemAgro CEO and founder Johann Coelho.
Currently, the company focuses on commodities like corn, soybeans, cotton and sugarcane in several different countries across Latin America and Southeast Asia, including Brazil, Colombia, Paraguay, Thailand and Indonesia, to name a few.
Suzano Ventures’ participation in the round opens to door to forestry management, which he says fits well within BemAgro’s goal to be monitoring 10 million hectares of land by 2032, says Coelho. There is also is currently demand from companies in this sector for technologies like BemAgro’s.
Similar to the sugarcane industry, forest management (aka “silviculture”) companies work with enormous areas of land.
“These corporations are prepared to insert this kind of technology into their daily workflow, [and] because they have technology teams, they are always looking to optimize their operations,” says Coelho. With the BemAgro platform, “the forest industry can subscribe to the software and have access to features around process, planning, control, monitoring and extracting insights and actionable information that they can actually put to work.”
“The software we have already implemented in sugarcane fields has a similar approach. With sugarcane, you plant one year and harvest for six or seven years in a row. When you think about forestry, you plant one year and harvest in seven, so the crop is very similar.”
Forestry companies are beginning to invest more in technology, he says, in areas such as guidance systems and using more precision technologies. For example, forestry operations have to do plant counts to index plant health, quantities, and other factors.
“Today, teams go manually into the field to collect this information,” explains Coelho. “This procedure is very expensive and also very time consuming. [BemAgro’s platform] would allow a company to get more accurate information and a better response time.”
“We are not looking to replace any procedures, just to be able, through AI, to optimize and automate those processes.”
‘We wanted more than just the money’
Investors to the pre-Series A round are highly strategic, says Coelho.
CNH is a global equipment manufacturer, while Suzano is one of the largest pulp producers in the world and ATVOS is Brazil’s second-largest producer of market ethanol.
“Since the beginning, we’ve worried about who we were bringing to the table. We’ve had a lot of proposals from venture capital firms, but we wanted more than the money. For us, it was very important to know exactly where we wanted to go and what we wanted to achieve in the upcoming years.”
Suzano’s participation in the round is especially strategic.
“When Suzano came to the table, it was a perfect match, because we were able to not just raise the capital [from them], but also count on their expertise and their know-how and have access to their area of production,” explains Coalho.
“We were not just counting on R&D but also on having access to the tools that will enhance the training of our AI models and generate a lot of value for the company.”
BemAgro and Suzano have a two-year roadmap in place that will see the development of five different products. Suzano will also provide access to its farms and infrastructure as well as technical expertise.
“Our provision of capital, alongside access to Suzano’s farms, operations, and technical expertise, will provide the resources necessary to accelerate the development of BemAgro’s technologies, alongside its adoption across the [agroforestry] sector,” notes Álvaro Gómez Rodríguez, a senior manager at Suzano Ventures.
The partnership will first target eucalyptus trees as well as peanut trees, which are similar in the ways they need to be managed, says Coelho.
Geographically speaking, BemAgro is targeting entry into the North American and European markets by 2026, he adds.