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.
