Verdi's personalized plant healthcare platform attracts major investment from SVG Ventures Pioneer Fund

Agriculture technology startup Verdi has secured significant investment from SVG Ventures through the THRIVE Pioneer Fund, helping Verdi scale its operations in North America as it commercializes its personalized plant healthcare platform with food brands and their growers. With this investment, SVG Ventures joins a roster of other notable investors in Verdi including Emmertech, Startup Haven Fund, Rhiza Capital, RareBreed Ventures, and Dangerous Ventures.

Verdi is helping the world’s largest food brands across wine, fruits, and nuts to achieve their crop production and efficiency targets while mitigating their climate risks. The company has helped food brands increase marketable yields by 10%, while using up to 60% less water and 10% less fertilizer. In 2022 alone, Verdi saved over 7 million liters of water for farmers – the equivalent of 14 million bottles of water.

″Climate change poses an unprecedented challenge to farmers and Verdi’s technology will play an important role in helping food brands mitigate climate risk while boosting crop yields. Verdi has been able to deliver impressive yield and efficiency benefits to growers, which is a testament to the team’s customer-centric approach to technology innovation,″ said John Hartnett, CEO of SVG Ventures.

Verdi has built the world’s first scalable platform to personalize healthcare for plants, using advanced data analytics and fleets of intelligent devices to help farmers radically optimize food production. Through a seamless retrofit, Verdi’s device fleets bring legacy farm infrastructure (e.g. irrigation systems) online, giving farmers a physical endpoint to optimize crop water and nutrient management through Verdi’s proprietary software tools and data science models.

Beyond optimizing crop production, food brands are using Verdi’s technology for a wide variety of other use cases, from soil health management, to open-field climate control, to breeding drought-resilient crop varieties. This is made possible through Verdi’s modular hardware, fleet management software, and data engine – the latter of which allows Verdi to combine proprietary data, optional 3rd party data, and manual farmer observations to adapt automations to different use cases and train AI models.

″We’re seeing remarkable demand for our technology from growers and food brands globally as they deal with critical challenges on multiple fronts: climate-induced crop losses, rising labor and input costs, and volatile markets,″ said Verdi CEO Arthur Chen. ″SVG Ventures’ investment is a significant endorsement of our work and we are excited to continue working with them to bring climate-resilient agriculture to planetary scale.″

About Verdi

Verdi has built the world’s first scalable platform to personalize healthcare for plants – and in turn help food brands operationalize climate-resilient agriculture. Using advanced data analytics and fleets of intelligent devices, Verdi’s award-winning technology enables a wide range of novel farming applications, from variable rate irrigation in horticulture, to sensor-driven irrigation automation. Verdi is working with the world’s largest food brands to reach their crop productivity and sustainability targets, and in 2022 saved customers over 7 million liters of water. Verdi is backed by internationally-recognized investors such as SVG Ventures, Alchemist Accelerator, and Emmertech.