The Climate Corporation (owned by Monsanto) has acquired Estonia-based farm management startup VitalFields. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although we’re told the VitalFields team will be joining The Climate Corporation.
The agtech startup raised $1.2 million in Series A funding back in May 2015. Backers include SmartCap, the investment arm of taxpayer-funded Estonian Development Fund, and what was described at the time as an unnamed large Silicon Valley-based VC.
Monsanto Growth Ventures (MGV), the venture capital arm of Monsanto Company, also later became an investor, lining up today’s acquisition.
Founded in 2011 at the Garage48 hackathon, and also an alumnus of accelerator Startup Wise Guys, VitalFields offers cloud-based software and accompanying mobile apps to help farmers do things like plant disease and growth phase modelling, tracking climatic patterns, and other farm management-related activity such as farm planning, stock management and P&L reports.
Or, to put it even more simply, VitalFields is a classic SaaS play, replacing old, largely, paper-based ways of doing things, or legacy and expensive software and tools that were never really designed to do the job.
“At Climate, our vision is to deliver one centralized digital agriculture platform to provide farmers with the tools they need to optimize their operations,” said Mike Stern, chief executive officer for The Climate Corporation, in a statement.
“VitalFields has built a successful business spanning multiple European countries, and we see how their digital tools will complement our Climate FieldView™ platform offerings in the future. This acquisition marks Climate’s first step into the European market, and we’re looking forward to working with VitalFields to grow and enhance their current tools to help farmers maximize their return on every hectare.”