Today’s global challenges demand farmers to digitize and to equipe themselves with services allowing to feed 9 billions people worldwide within the next decade.
Famers are also facing other important challenges such as climate emergencies and anticipating new consumer expectations’ capability.
Thankfully, France has got a vast and rich Agtech ecosystem as revealed by XAnge (Venture Capital Firm) which published at the end of February, for the second year, the mapping of start-ups and innovative SMEs. This mapping represents the French know-how in Agtech.
itk’s agriintelligence: IA & deeptech
Itk is very well represented both by its parent company in the DST category (Decision Support Tools) as well as in the IoT (Internet Of Things) category through its subsidiary Medria breeding company.
As precision agricuture and risk management’s specialist, ITK deploys both licensed and customised IT solutions for its clients.
Alhough being 17 years old, the company considers itself still at the beginning of the impact it wants (and will have) on this Industry.
In 2019, ITK reached the scale-up level by raising funds in order to keep on with its evangelization work in a sector still known for being quite immature in artificial interlligence and deeptech’s usage.
Foresight: bigdata and agronomic modelling
Despite the undoubtful leadership of United States and Asia actors in today’s globalized agriculture, supply of French digital services is on the rise.
Tomorrow’s challenges will be to collect and interpret data in order to bring value to the farmer with predictions ; keeping in mind he is the only pilot able to actually take the final decisions about his farm.
Among the Agritech trends described by XAnge, we are particularly convinced of the impact of the following three trends:
- The collect of on-site data (with connected objects -IoT) and data purchased/provided from/by other sources (weather, satellite images, etc.).
- The processing of data and recommendations for operational action plans (DST = decision support tool).
- Intelligent mechanization associated with service platforms which allows large-scale deployment.
The “platformisation” of solutions through the analysis of a huge volume of data will enable the farmer to adapt to increasingly diverse production conditions, thanks to the enrichment of machine learning algorithms, with the modelling of scientific crop research data.
Pooling the strengths of the digital agricultural ecosystem
ITK is honored to be one of the leading start-ups within the Agtech ecosystem; the company would also like to pay tribute for the work done by XAnge.
XAnge provided the missing picture enabling for a better understanding of the digital agriculture sector.
Competing with American and Asian big Agtech leaders means being able to raise French Agtech level which may lead to the definition of new smarter “coopetitions” into tomorrow’s game.
ITK, which is member of La ferme Digitale as well as several public-private consortia is totally looking in this direction so that tomorrow can give birth to some new european leaders able to promote the French top-notch agricultural production model.
A “french model” strongly invested in the respect of the environment (agrivoltaism, organic fertilizers, biomethane, carbon storage) and the sustainability of the planet.
The ongoing COVID-19 health crisis gives us the opportunity to (re)think about agriculture resilience. It reinforces the understanding of agriculture strategic importance, being our society’s keystone.
This crisis will quickly and collectively invite us to question the need to strengthen the food self-sufficiency of France and the EU, and its corollary: the need to maintain a high level of productivity in European agriculture.
We may dream of 2021 as the year where this mapping of actors shrinks and let emerge new french and european champions ready to tackle tomorrow’s challenges?
Predict and Decide