Banks are starting to understand the immense value in data generated by farms, with NAB Ventures backing a seed fundraising for Geora, an agriculture technology start-up that has built a system to capture crop data that could allow lenders to create bespoke financial products for the rural sector.
Geora co-founders Bridie Ohlsson and Cadel Watson. “We can track something as complex as an agricultural supply chain,” says Ms Ohlsson.For example, a bank could see the quality of a crop while it was still in the ground and lend against it more confidently, which could increase the amount of capital available to one of the most important sectors in the Australian economy.
Banks are still at an experimental stage but National Australia Bank’s interest in Geora points to the development of new, asset-backed products that should reduce the risk for banks. The investment is NAB Venture’s first foray into agtech in Australia, although theNAB Ventures managing director Todd Forest said feeding rural data into NAB’s business banking systems is still some time away, but pilot programs are being developed.“It is just around the corner now,” he said.
Tenacious, a specialist agtech investor, has raised $35 million over the past two years and counts the federal government’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation and Grok Ventures, the personal investment fund of Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, as investors. It works by using non-fungible tokens to create a digital representation of the asset itself. The blockchain technology creates trust between parties who do not know each other. Smart contracts create immutable asset records that allow ownership to be transferred digitally while recognising the fungible nature of commodities.
The SaaS model allows farmers to create assets and experiment with Geora’s application programming interfaces for free; it charges $750 a month for a customised platform allowing users to deploy financial products and issue up to 1000 certificates to verify carbon footprint, quality or origin.
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