It’s the most wonderful time of the year! It’s time for the research team at AFN‘s parent company AgFunder to start compiling its global agrifoodtech investments report, which will be released in early March.
Our reports have been our love letter to the industry for nearly 10 years. And given it’s the leading and most comprehensive agrifoodtech funding report out there, used by countless venture capital funds, corporates, and startups in their pitch decks and presentations for years, it’s important we get it right.
It is a painstaking process that involves numerous hours of manual curation from many members of our team and, as you’ll read below, increasingly involves the time and energies of a growing network of partners globally. But it’s also built on the support of the agrifoodtech community to ensure all of your deals are counted and represented – and have the chance to be featured in front of our 90,000-strong network.
“Lyro was featured in AgFunder’s recent 2022 Asia-Pacific AgriFoodTech Investment report, highlighting that we are leading the way for robots as a service in agriculture as demand for our robot packing service skyrockets in Australia. Given we’ve only raised $1 million in funding have robots developed from prototypes ready to be commercially deployed, we’re hopeful being featured in the report will turn into more investor interactions and funding coming our way,” said Juxi Leitner, cofounder of Lyro. [Disclosure: Lyro was part of the latest cohort of GROW Accelerator startups. GROW is part of the AgFunder group.]
What’s our process?
Our process has developed over the past eight years to involve a combination of machine learning, manual curation, partnerships and community involvement.
- Using machine learning algorithms, we scan Crunchbase, company websites, and other public data sources to identify and categorize all deals relating to our sector. We then manually curate each company to ensure its relevance. We’ve taught our algorithms how to identify and categorize each company by learning from over eight years of compiling the report, but ultimately each deal needs an extra manual touch.
- On top of that, we partner with groups across the globe to ensure we capture as many deals as possible, including those that have been recorded or reported elsewhere; this global reach is unique among our competitors. Our data partners include Omnivore, BitsxBites, Shakeup Factory, ReFED, GLOCAL, SP Ventures, Startup Nation Central, The Big Deal, and others.
- We constantly update our datasets from previous years as new deals come to light to ensure data is always complete.
- Importantly, we make sure to reach out to all the leading VCs in the agrifoodtech space to ensure their deals are counted.
Despite our best efforts, some deals still slip through the net, and with the agrifoodtech investment industry expanding rapidly each year, it’s hard to keep up with all the new entrants. Whether you’re an investor, a founder or otherwise worked on an agrifoodtech funding round, you can help ensure your funding activity is counted.
What’s included in our report
Our report focuses on investment in technology companies targeting the food and agriculture sector, across the whole value chain.
Companies must be impacting or alternating how food and agricultural products are produced, transported, prepared, sold, or consumed.
They must be private companies.
We include equity and venture debt deals from seed stage up to late stage.
We do not include grants or M&A transactions (except in a separate list). We may plan to report on these types of funding in future reports, so it’s still worth making sure this information is submitted to Crunchbase.
Find out more about our methodology and what’s included in the appendix of our recent reports here.
Make your deals count!
The easiest way to ensure your agrifoodtech investment deals are included in our report is to add them directly to Crunchbase.
Crunchbase is an amazing service that uses crowdsourcing to collect data which are then verified by its army of data geeks. To add your deals, you just need to create a free login (even easier if you use a social media account and link it to that) and then either add an investment deal to a current startup profile or create a new profile if the company has not yet been added.
More detailed instructions on submitting a funding round and a company profile to Crunchbase can be found here and here respectively. You can also add your investor to an existing round; instructions here.
Our in-house software will then pull these data from Crunchbase into our report. If you’re concerned about confidentiality, you can choose which details to include and which to withhold.
If for some reason this doesn’t work for you, you can also send your deal information direct to Crunchbase via [email protected]crunchbase.com where the team tells me they will happily help.
You’re also welcome to email us at [email protected] — highlighting any details you want to remain confidential — and we will include them for you. But considering the vast number of deals to curate this year, submitting directly to Crunchbase will be safer.
Our report is our love letter to the ecosystem – help us to share the love and check your Crunchbase profile *before January 10, 2023* to make sure your investments are included.
Read our previous reports – including last year’s global agrifoodtech investment report – here.
