Today, AgTech company, SupPlant, is excited to announce a recent Series A funding round that raised $27 million. The round was led by Red Dot Capital Partners with participation from Menomadin Foundation, Smart-Agro Fund, Mivtah Shamir, Deshpande Foundation, PBFS and Maor Investments. As part of this round, Atad Peled of Red Dot will join SupPlant’s Board of Directors.

Global warming is gravely impacting farmers. They must deal with unpredictable and constantly changing climate daily; the uncertainty and extremity of climate change are developing at rapid speeds. Moreover, there is a constant lack of irrigation water.

Changing the basic concept of irrigation methods

SupPlant, the Israeli startup generating climate-smart irrigation recommendations, is hoping to digitally inform farmers around the world to be more resilient to volatile weather events. Their technology is superior to the common practices available and is built for the vast majority of farmers on earth. Often, smallholders can't afford access to hardware, intense technology, and unique knowledge, but SupPlant is trying to change that.

As a leader in the field of precision agriculture, SupPlant’s technology is enabling farmers to improve yields, productivity, and water use efficiency on a large scale. The technology combines data collected from soil, plant, and weather sensors to understand and identify the main parameters affecting the optimal performance of plants. SupPlant’s database is the largest plant database in the world, accumulated by data collected from 32 crops in 14 countries, covering growing conditions from dry arid regions of the Middle East to tropical conditions in central America. Combining and analyzing all the data, in real-time, using intelligent algorithms, SupPlant provides a precise irrigation plan and recommendations on a daily and weekly basis to maximize crops and budget. They are putting away the uncertainties of climate change, varieties, and growing conditions. They recently launched an API product– a sensor-less technology. Sensors are placed on the plants and their surroundings which radiate the plant’s data to the cloud. It measures how much water the plant actually needs to maximize growth. This data is translated by using artificial intelligence and big data to irrigation models, recommendations, and actionable insights in combination with SupPlant’s database.

SupPlant fruit sensor. Credit: SupPlant

The new API technology is designed for the world’s 450 million small growers. In the last season alone, the product served over 500,000 female maize farmers in Kenya. In 2022, SupPlant aims that over 1 million smallholders in Africa and India will be utilizing its new technology. With the funds from this funding round, they plan on continuing to develop their sensor-less API product but also plan to invest in new markets like those of the UAE and Morocco, made possible by the Abraham Accords.

Atad Peled, Principal at Red Dot and newest member of SupPlant’s Board of Directors stated, “We were impressed by SupPlant’s abilities and recent expansion into strategic markets. We were also inspired by their goal: working with smallholder farms, which usually do not have access to AgTech. Food security will be a major issue in coming years, and we feel certain SupPlant’s solution will have a stand-out role in it”.

SupPlant was founded in 2016 by Zohar Ben-Ner who acts as the company's president. They were recently chosen as one of TIME’s Best Inventions and have raised a total of $46 million.