Tech
Crop monitoring startup PlanetWatchers used this 11-slide pitch deck to raise a $11 million Series A from Seraphim Space and help farmers get paid after extreme weather events.
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- A crop monitoring startup just raised a $11 million Series A from Seraphim Space.
- London-based PlanetWatchers uses military-built technology to verify insurance claims.
- We got an exclusive look at the 11-slide redacted pitch deck it used to raise the funds.
A startup helping to insure the agriculture industry through crop monitoring has raised a $11 million Series A from Seraphim Space.
London-based PlanetWatchers has developed an analytics platform for crops, which it can monitor at any time and regardless of weather.
Founded in 2016, the company can verify a farmer’s acreage, tillage, crops, and when crops were planted. It can also document issues like weather damage.
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It does this using synthetic aperture radar (SAR), a remote sensing technology that CEO Dominic Edmunds said originated from and is still largely used by the military.
“When you are monitoring things across the Earth for military purposes, you can’t really afford to say ‘it’s cloudy, we can’t see what’s going on,'” he told Insider. SAR is microwave technology that “bounces off the Earth’s surface” to detect physical things on the ground and track changes over time. SAR can penetrate cloud cover and pass through poor lighting conditions at night, Edmunds said.
The means PlanetWatchers can give accurate data to insurance companies no matter the weather, he added.
The startup takes advantage of infrastructure already out there, such as the European Space Agency’s Sentinel data, and feeds various data into its machine-learning-powered platform. Insurers can then tap into the platform whenever they need to, for example when a farmer makes a claim or is taking out a new policy.
This is particularly important as extreme weather events become more – “eye-wateringly” – frequent. “That means an increase in claims and increasing impact on the food production supply chain,” Edmunds said.
“The more third party data sources that are available to quickly validate and support an event that’s occurred to get money in the hands of the farmer faster, reduce overheads on the insurer and reach that point of agreement can only improve that relationship.”
SpaceTech investor Seraphim Space and deeptech firm Creative Ventures co-led the Series A, with The Trendlines Agrifood Fund, BIG Capital and Ridgeline Partners also participating.
The cash injection will be used to double-down on the North American market, where PlanetWatchers is currently focused. It is also looking at Canada and South America.
“Clearly we have a global ambition to tell the story of every field, but we started in the US because it’s a data-rich area. When you’re considering AI and machine learning, training data is really important,” Edmunds said.
The chief executive also plans on doubling the company’s headcount to 60 over the next 12 months but stressed his focus on revenue, not rapid growth.
It brings the company’s total raised to $19.5 million.
Check out the redacted 11-slide pitch deck below.
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