Israeli agtech startup SupPlant accelerates product development with $10m funding dedicated to sensor-less irrigation system

SupPlant, a precision agriculture hardware-software solution, announced its recent funding round, raising $10 million to accelerate its industry defining and disrupting sensor-less irrigation API product. The round is co-led by Boresight Capital, Menomadin Foundation, Smart-Agro Fund and Mivtah Shamir. The raise brings SupPlants’s total funding to more than $19 million.  

The round comes amidst global warming world-wide impacting smallholder farmers who are dealing daily with the unpredicted climate that is changing rapidly and the constant lack of irrigation water. SupPlant is making their technology available to these vulnerable populations by changing the basic concept of irrigation methods. It is designed for the world’s 450 million small growers, as 76% of farmers grow crops on less than 2 hectares. By September 2021 the sensor-less technology will be implemented by 500,000 farmers in Kenya, Africa. In 2022, SupPlant aims that over 2 million smallholders in Africa and India will be utilizing its new technology.

This unique technology will be able to save water, reduce costs, improve productivity and yield. SupPlant uses agronomic algorithms, artificial intelligence and cloud-based technology to help farmers achieve these goals. SupPlant measures the stress of the plant and monitors water content and plant and fruit growth patterns. This  data is then combined with real-time and forecasted climatic data and projected plant growth patterns. All this info is uploaded every 10 minutes to an algorithm in the cloud, which provides simple, precise irrigation recommendations to farmers based on the integration of all this data. SupPlant’s database holds the combined expertise of 31 crops across 14 countries, covering growing conditions from dry arid regions of the Middle East to tropical conditions in central America. SupPlant’s vision is that this system will be integrated into every irrigation command given on earth.

Up until this point in time, SupPlant’s technology was a hardware-software solution which grew by 1,200% in 2020, widely used in Mexico, South Africa, Argentina and Australia. With the new product developed, SupPlant will be providing as much of the benefits of SupPlant’s autonomous irrigation technology as possible — without requiring the investments in infrastructure required by the full system.

The new technology collects and analyzes local climatic data and unique plant and irrigation data from a Model Training Farm' that services ~10K small growers with the same variety. Thus providing low-cost irrigation solutions without the necessity of larger capital investments in hardware on the ground. This will allow small growers to gain the value derived from an adaptable irrigation strategy.

"The funds raised in this round will allow us to speed up implementation of our new development - a fully sensor-less industry defining irrigation regime. It is far superior from any common practice available and is built for the vast majority of farmers on earth - smallholders that can’t afford access to hardware intense technology and unique knowledge” said Ori Ben Ner, CEO of SupPlant “We already have strategic and disruptive agreements in place with global leaders that will allow us to reach millions of farmers in the upcoming year with this new and exciting technology."

“In a world at risk to the destructive impacts of a changing climate, SupPlant’s solution—seek actionable insight farmers can turn into smart irrigation decisions, by “talking with” the plants that produce our foods—is a concrete example of how technology can improve our world” said Jeffrey Swartz, Partner at Boresight, the former CEO of Timberland and a leader of in the sustainable commerce and justice sphere. “Across a variety of critical crops and a wide range of geographies, from small hold farmers to larger scale food producers—we invest in SupPlant because SupPlant helps farmers produce more, better food, sustainably.”