Israeli digital farming company Phytech announced today the closing of an $11 million series B financing round led by Tencent Holdings Limited, with participation of existing investors Syngenta Ventures and others. The investment will support the company's growth and worldwide deployment.
Based at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai in southern Israel, Phytech is an agricultural technology company that helps farmers cope with the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is rapidly transforming farming practices, where digitalization, smart sensing, and predictive applications are now a necessity for farmers to optimize production in order to meet future global food demands.
Phytech help farmers address these challenges by constantly sensing, communicating and analysing plant demands through its proprietary IoT and AI platform. This data provides farmers real-time recommendations through simple-to-use farm management applications and helps them increase crop yields while decreasing resource inputs. Phytech’s machine learning capabilities identifies water stress by means of direct plant monitoring and is the most accurate way to make irrigation decisions, the heart of the cultivation process.
Phytech’s scientifically proven technology is deployed successfully by world leading growers in the U.S, Australia and Israel in a large variety of specialty and row crops. Over the last growing seasons, Phytech has seen 3X growth rates and near 100% retention of existing customers, creating the largest real-time plant performance database benchmark in most crops.
Phytech CEO Sarig Duek said, “We are grateful for the trust and support of Tencent and our existing investors, which is contributed to the vote of confidence from the growing community of global leading growers that are transforming their daily farming practices with our Plant-Demand predictive applications, resulting in higher yields and reduced use of resources. We believe that all farmers around the globe should be provided with the opportunity to transform to Plant-Demand practices, and plan to achieve this goal with the support of our world leading partners."
"Global agriculture is facing pressure from all directions. The individual farmer sees tightening margins, and overall planetary food producing capacity is challenged by climate change, topsoil erosion, water stress, urbanization, and more. When looking for companies that could address these complex issues, we were continuously impressed by Phytech and their passionate customers. The Phytech solution optimizes overall plant health, and can significantly boost planet productivity, while making valuable reductions in water usage. The benefit to farmers and the planet overall is clear: higher yields, less water use, healthier plants. This is just the beginning. We're excited to be part of this journey", says David Wallerstein, Tencent’s Chief Exploration Officer and Senior Executive Vice President.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on September 28, 2017
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