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Capital investment to accelerate potential of agtech integration engine
Making it easier for farmers to access, visualise and analyse disparate sets of critical on-farm data has put Pairtree at the forefront of the smart farm revolution. Now the innovative agtech company is seeking to raise $1.5 to $2million investment to accelerate their plan to deliver benefits to growers and agronomists across Australia and around the world.
It’s not every day you receive international acclaim for your agtech innovation.
For fifth generation farmer Hamish Munro, however, global gratification has come not once, but twice, in the past two years thanks to an annual awards program recognising innovation in agricultural and food technologies around the world.
Hamish is the founder and CEO of Australian agtech startup Pairtree, which picked up the coveted Farm Management Solution of the Year title at the 2022 AgTech Breakthrough Awards held in Los Angeles in August 2022.
This triumph followed hot on the heels of Pairtree’s 2021 success at the same awards, where it was honoured as the Farm Management Innovation of the Year.
The well-deserved acknowledgement put the spotlight on Pairtree’s agnostic and independent dashboarding system, which centralises disparate data sets into a single log-in space. This enables ‘data stacking’ for higher level analytics and greater decision support for farmers.
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“That award recognition was really exciting. To be known internationally for what we are doing is a clear indication that overcoming this issue of interoperability, or data silos, is a global issue,” said Hamish.
“From our research and from what we've seen, there's no-one else doing what we do really well.
“We turn farm data and digital services into priceless information to help drive efficiencies and improve decision-making support and confidence.
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“We don’t tell you which hardware, software or digital services to use on your farm – that’s entirely up to you. But we are here to unify the information to help farmers make the best decisions they can with the information they have.”
With such great uptake Pairtree is now seeking to raise $1.5 million to $2 million in capital from investors to continue expanding locally and into international markets.
- Learn more about Pairtree’s investment opportunity via AgriFutures growAG. here.^
Centralising farm data with integrated technology
About 80 per cent of farmers are reviewing data every day from up to 10 individual apps, hardware and software sources, whether its on-farm tech measuring their water levels, online news about commodity markets or computer-based programs keeping track of their finances.
Pairtree was founded with the aim to create a universal dashboard to centralise data sets from across the entire farm operation and throughout the supply chain.
The data integrations enable farmers to compare and analyse different data sets in the one place, such as looking at rainfall records alongside soil moisture probes and yield records; comparing current cattle weights with real time auction prices; or weighing up grains futures prices against geo-located weather forecasts for your farm.
“All this information was sitting in different data silos and no-one could easily access everything in one spot, to make higher level decisions from the aggregated data,” said Hamish.
“With Pairtree, it's all there, you can log in anywhere in the world to access it instantly and see it all overlaid on your home farm map.”
STARTUP NETWORK VIDEO: Pairtree Founder, Hamish Munro takes us through how the platform is delivering value for producers. Dubbo producer, Jack Cresswell tells us why other farmers should be jumping on board.
Evolving the solution for agtech providers
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While Pairtree Plus, as the dashboard was known, has been a great success, Hamish said the company has refined its vision to hone in on the potential offered by the integration engine created to power the technology.
Pairtree has the largest ecosystem of Paired Partners (integrations) within Australia.
“What we realised was that our fundamental service was our integration engine. We've got 130 different integrations, including everything from weather stations, soil probes, tank sensors, vehicle tracking and animal tracking, as well as satellite imagery, tractor telemetries and a whole range of different apps to manually collect on-farm data,” said Hamish.
While the company is still working directly with farmers, Pairtree is now also providing tailor-made “white-label” solutions for agtech and IoT device suppliers, corporate agribusinesses, government agencies and other service providers.
This approach allows Pairtree’s customers to deliver the user-friendly digital services and data feeds their clients need under the branding they are familiar with.
White Label success stories
So far, Hamish said Pairtree has developed around 12 different white labels to provide custom solutions for a range of different service providers.
“We feel that we are adding additional value to each one of these agtech companies, as their service is being leveraged for additional value, in a touch-free approach. This should help ‘rust-on’ clients to good quality service providers,” said Hamish.
“We've got one white label that's operating in Papua New Guinea through a company called Dimitra, which works at a non-government organisation level to help improve the production of corn. Dimitra's got the network and the boots on the ground to provide some services, but they've asked us to pull together a number of data sets from drones and other inputs to help assess and manage or improve the productivity for the local growers in Papua New Guinea.
“Another white label we've developed is for AuctionsPlus. We created a market insight tool, called Livestock BI, which enables AuctionsPlus to provide their clients with market data that is specific to the farmer's growing area. They didn't have that capacity to geo-locate market data and that's what we provided so the farmer could look at what sales were close to them and have a really accurate price on what their cattle or sheep were worth.”
Another project getting a lot of publicity is Pairtree’s work with Syngenta on the Farm Junction Point project, which is supported by a $170,000 Accelerating Commercialisation Grant, as part of the Australian Government’s Entrepreneurs’ Program.
The project is exploring how to provide greater hyper local, “paddock-level” disease insights in actionable ways to farmers and agronomists.
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Capital raise to seed new level of growth
The white label approach has allowed Pairtree to break into new markets and service even more farmers across Australia, as well as taking their first steps into the international market.
They are currently seeking to raise $1.5 million to $2 million in capital from investors to help accelerate their growth into even more markets.
“We are leading Australia at the moment within this space, we've spent the last four-and-a-half years establishing a complimentary ecosystem with all of our partners, and making sure that our services align with them rather than competing against them,” said Hamish.
“This capital raise is about expanding those opportunities in Australia, and being in a position to be operating in some overseas markets in the next 12 to 18 months.
“We’re looking for strategic investors that really understand the value of data and want to help us work through where the opportunities are and grow with us.
“We have done the hard work, integrating and understanding the patterns that can enable future scalability. We're already commercial and revenue positive, so it's a good opportunity for strategic investors to jump on board and help us push that snowball further down the hill.
“We welcome stakeholders and strategic partners that see our vision and want to help us deliver that to farmers globally.”
Find out more about Pairtree’s capital raising opportunity here, via AgriFutures growAG..
^This investment opportunity is only for professional and sophisticated investors as defined in the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth). The content of this opportunity is intended for use by persons having professional experience in matters relating to investments and must not be acted or relied upon by any other person including, without limitation, retail clients.
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