Thursday, June 23, 2016

Farm technology company raising $11 million

Resson Aerospace Corp. has raised $11 million US for research into technology that will improve farming, especially under drought conditions.

Resson works out of a National Research Council laboratory in New Brunswick. It raised $3 million in a previous round of funding.
This time it’s backed by a number of venture-capital firms and will use the money for research and development, to build sales operations and to open an office in San Jose, Calif., hoping both to partner with Californian agricultural universities and to leverage its technology to assist with the state’s drought problems

This is truly global,” said Jeff Grammer, Resson’s executive chairman and an early investor through his firm Rho Canada Ventures. “If you look at McCain (Foods Ltd.), they basically have potato acreage worldwide. They’re looking at this as a much wider program than just New Brunswick.”
The $11-million figure, worth about $14-million Canadian, would make the deal one of the biggest early-stage funding rounds in the Atlantic region since the financial crisis, according to data provided by Thomson Reuters.
Contributing to this round are Rho Canada, McCain, Halifax’s Build Ventures, Saint John’s East Valley Ventures, the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, BDC Capital, and lead investor Monsanto Growth Ventures, the venture-capital arm of seed company Monsanto.
We were quite impressed by the drive that they have, the uniqueness of what they’re trying to do, and the level of sophistication they’re trying to get to,” McCain chief executive officer Dirk Van de Put told The Globe and Mail.
Using photos of crops – from tractor cameras, drones or satellite imagery – the company has developed image-processing technology that, combined with ground-sensor data, uses large-scale cloud-based data processing to help farmers assess crop production and field conditions. “Using their algorithms on the imaging side and what’s happening in the dirt itself, they’re able to do predictive analytics,” Mr. Grammer said. “It helps a farmer understand what diseases could be coming to their farms.”


Eventually, he said, the technology could be harvested to help farmers achieve maximum return on investment for their businesses, such as by helping farmers figure out how much water or herbicide they should use on a given field.