The global population is steadily nearing 8 billion people, meaning pretty soon, this planet will have 8 billion mouths to feed. While the growers working to cultivate all that food have their hands full monitoring their farms, an LA startup is equipping them with a digital tool to help them grow their business amid rising demand. CropSafe announced a $3 million seed round on Tuesday led by Elefund to expand its reach.
CropSafe is an operating system that enables farmers to apply specific modules to their farms that the startup can monitor through satellite imagery and weather stations. These modules allow users to track the condition and health of their fields as well as inclement weather that may negatively impact their crops. For instance, the app can keep tabs on blight, heavy rain, wildfires and the like and alert farmers to the information they need to prepare accordingly ahead of time.
“We realized that there’s a lot of new farming management software coming into the market that was really cool, that used satellites and sensors and had all this data,” John McElhone, CEO and co-founder of CropSafe, told Built In. “But we realized that a lot of farmers around us were having a lot of difficulty adopting it because farmers are really good at farming, but they’re not great at interpreting satellite imagery from NASA, for example. And so what we wanted to do was build a piece of software that would allow farmers to take advantage of that useful data without the need for them to have to interpret it.”
Originally created in Ireland, CropSafe is the brainchild of McElhone and his co-founder Micheál McLaughlin. The two developed the premise for the solution while still in high school as a project to help their neighbors and themselves, having both grown up on small farms. Since then, the company has established a U.S. headquarters in Santa Monica and serves a customer base that spans countries around the world.
The new injection of capital will help CropSafe expand its U.S. presence. Currently operating across 14 states, the company plans to double this number over the next 12 months. Eventually, it hopes to bring its product to small and medium-sized farms in every state, and then expand globally.
“We think it’s possible to increase every single farm in the planet’s production by 10 percent,” McElhone said. “It might kind of sound like a small number, but if you think on a global scale of how many people we have to feed right now and how the world’s population isn’t slowing down … something you want to be able to do is increase the production of farms to be able to feed an additional 1 billion people.”
The company recently moved stateside to leverage Los Angeles’ pool of talent. Local universities such as the University of Southern California produce talent trained in the skills CropSafe is looking to recruit. In addition to this, a number of aerospace companies reside in the West Coast region, putting CropSafe closer to its satellite imagery providers.
CropSafe is planning to add some additional capabilities to its solution throughout this year, namely financial tools. With all the data CropSafe gathers, the solution is helpful for tracking bottlenecks on farms, according to McElhone. Building on this finding, the company plans to offer farmers a way to receive pre-approved financing without having to go through traditional financial routes. Its goal through such is to help farmers increase production and yield volume.
Currently powered by a team of six people, CropSafe is planning to double the size of its team by the end of 2022. The company is actively hiring to fill roles across software engineering, product management and design.
