Opportunity for

• Strategically aligned investors, or a group of investors, seeking equity investment in a scalable soil technology and carbon removal solution.^
• Agritech partners interested in complementary ecosystem services to de-risk soils and accelerate access to institutional finance through carbon projects.
• Investors with organisational scale and capacity; expertise in measurement technology fields, such as Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), next-gen remote sensing, and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite technology is desirable. 

Opportunity Description

Industry Challenge:

Soil has the potential to be a huge material climate sink, but carbon removal technology currently lacks a de-risked commercial pathway to realise that potential. Australia’s leading soil carbon project developer, AgriProve is committed to moving ‘the potential, to actual delivery’ and has identified six issues to the overarching problem:

1. Soil sampling expenses
2. High compliance costs
3. Complex administrative processes
4. Evidence-based soil management understanding, still in development
5. Customised on-farm data-driven algorithms, still in development
6. Associated co-benefits remain theoretical, without measurement

De-risking carbon removal technology will not only establish soil as a viable asset class and a commercial pathway to global decarbonisation but also addresses various interconnected aspects aligning with macro forces shaping the future of agriculture. These include electrification, automation, provenance, food fraud for food security, and supply chain management.

Carbon removal globally is set to become a trillion-dollar industry. Based on AgriProve’s calculations Australia has approximately 65 million hectares of grazing and crop lands (excluding rangelands), soils could potentially deliver 100 million tonnes of carbon drawdown per year, equivalent to $10 billion annually by 2030, based on an implied carbon price of $100 per tonne.

The market opportunity aligns with the growing recognition of agricultural lands' pivotal role in soil carbon sequestration and enhancing essential ecosystem services for a climate-resilient future.

Current Opportunity:

In order to ‘accelerate far beyond the status quo’, AgriProve is seeking a material Series B investment of more than A$30million to:

• accelerate its strategy within the Australian market
• support its boots-enabled tech development
• drive its international expansion.

The objective of AgriProve’s Series B investment is to de-risk soil as an investable asset class for scalable carbon removal, and accelerate access to institutional finance through soil carbon projects.

Since launch in 2018, AgriProve has engaged 550 farmers with registered carbon projects, representing one third of all types of Australia’s carbon projects, and recorded 33 projects with validated measured increases in soil carbon. With clear commercial success, (TRL of 5-6), industry-leading partners, and Federal Government soil carbon research projects at play, AgriProve is confident in reaching its goal: 10 million hectares and 25 million tonnes of sequestered carbon annually by 2030.

With its Series B investment, and potential industry partners, AgriProve seeks to scale its soil tech platform to index soil properties, and measure against soil carbon, and a whole raft of other analytes, to then develop customised management algorithms to optimise for overall landscape function.

Background Information:

AgriProve's solution is geared to improve soil health and soil carbon sampling using one-metre soil cores in conjunction with Near-Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy soil scanning, and next generation remote sensing inputs including Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) in addition to spectral and hyperspectral satellite imagery to predict, measure and validate. This approach captures a comprehensive range of soil properties.

Founded on a commercial incentive to unlock additional farmgate value, AgriProve forges equitable partnerships with producers and growers, which lays the groundwork for continued growth and a future ecosystem’s services wallet.

AgriProve simplifies participation in soil carbon projects by reducing upfront costs and associated risks, through the option of a deferred payment, which can be repaid through carbon credit generation. This covers baseline soil sampling, administration or audit costs for the lifetime of the project, and subsequent soil sampling rounds.

The solution provides a de-risked, scalable pathway for carbon removal. ‘De-risking soil carbon is a numbers game’, requiring more projects, proof points, evidence-based confidence in terms of measurement, management, impact on the landscape function, and competence in the end-market to underwrite that whole project proposition and then accelerate that investment to access institutional finance, not unlike the renewables sector.

By addressing the barriers of upfront costs and managing the risk, often preventing participation in soil carbon projects; and the industry’s lack of data through accelerated engagement, AgriProve is accumulating invaluable soil carbon data at scale.

Additional information/partners:

1. Collaborating with Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and the Grantham Foundation, in a $2.3 million, three-year research project to optimise AgriProve’s soil sampling and soil mapping approach, to ensure deployed practices are genuinely world-class.

2. Research partnership ($9.2m grant) with Earth Observing Systems Data Analytics (EOSDA) and AgriProve, as part of the National Soil Carbon Innovation Challenge, to accelerate synthetic aperture radar and optical satellite into LEO, as an input into soil organic carbon models.

3. Research partnership ($3.3m grant) with Hone Carbon and others on Hone Lab Red commercial scalability, exploring spectroscopy technology – as part of the National Soil Carbon Innovation Challenge. Outcomes will support AgriProve’s strategy in digitising soils.

^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.