Agreena
The market
Agriculture is foundational global infrastructure, but conventional practices are leaving soils eroded and causing biodiversity loss. Our growing population puts pressure on our food production which leads to an increase of greenhouse gas emissions coming from agriculture – approx.. 30% % of GHG emissions come from food production. Large food corporates acknowledge this but because of the high level of fragmentation, most corporates have poor supply chain visibility and hence a limited ability to understand the impact in their supply chain. As such, agriculture is the next can’t-lose frontier of climate-action. Interestingly, unlike most other sectors, agriculture can not only avoid making things worse – agriculture can also reverse negative climate impact through nature-based carbon removals in agricultural soils.
The solution is called regenerative farming practices. These practices include diversified, extended crop rotations, carbon fixing cover crops, reduced or no tillage of the soil, and reducing or replacing synthetic with organic inputs. When consistently and correctly applied, these practices have been shown to not only improve soil health, farm economics, enhancing biodiversity and increase climate resilience – but also reduce on-farm carbon emissions and importantly, remove atmospheric CO2 and store it in the soil. Given that approximately one-third of the global land is farmland, if applied at scale, carbon sequestration can remove 2-5 gigaton of carbon yearly, which represents 5-10% of the anthropogenic emissions. An effect corresponding to removing 850 million cars from the road or reducing US emissions by 75%.
The company
Regenerative agriculture (Regen Ag) is a fantastic opportunity from a food security and climate change perspective. However, it requires the active commitment and effort from the world’s 570 million farmers to implement the solutions. The whole agricultural ecosystem, while being a lock-in to the status quo for farmers, needs to transform to meet net-zero ambitions – which only happens if farmers change their ways of farming, by creating incentives and overcoming financial barriers.
Agreena’s purpose is to mobilise farmers and corporations, unlocking the value of nature to help restore the planet and create a more resilient food system. They do that via an end-to-end tech platform connecting farmers to corporates, creating a farm level visibility in the food supply chain. Specifically, they onboard farmers to regenerative practices and monitor, verify and report the results during the transition. Agreena combines farm level data and interface with satellite imagery and AI models, so that they can track and verify farmer practices at scale.
As such, Agreena acts as the intermediate between 1) a fragmented farmer landscape and 2) corporates and banks wanting to drive and finance the regenerative movement.
Starting with the farmers, Agreena’s platform enables farmers to get paid for “doing the right thing” with several avenues to monetise from transitioning to more sustainable farming practices such as carbon credits, premium on grains as well as access to green financing.
The platform also allows for food companies to track their carbon footprint and incentivise farmers to decrease their carbon emissions, corporates to buy carbon credits to offset emissions, and banks to provide green financing.
Agreena, on their side, monetise by providing detailed and verified outcomes, taking a cut on carbon credits and by charging corporates subscription fee for their supply chain visibility product.
The Investment Case
We first met with the Agreena team in early 2021 after having spent significant time trying to understand the CO2 impact of our food systems and how we can decarbonise one of the largest markets. We quickly understood that to really create a sustainable food production system, we need to start with decarbonising the farmland.
Agreena stood out to us with their farmer-first tech platform, which creates immediate and significant climate impact by facilitating famers to adopt regenerative practices – at scale.
Last but not least, what made us lead Agreena’s series A in early 2022 was our confidence in the founders, Simon and Julie. With their strong and diverse background, they are determined to deliver results that could (literally) be seen from the moon.
