Farm app Agrivi in talks with VCs for €1m

Agrivi, a Croatian agtech company providing farmers with a knowledge-based platform to help manage their farms, is in talks with a variety of venture capital firms in Europe and the US about a €1 million capital raising round.

Following an earlier €150,000 angel investment round from predominantly Croatia-based investors, the firm is raising the new capital to help speed up its expansion process, according to Matija Zulj, founder of the company.

Zulj, who started his career as an IT developer, decided to launch the application after starting his own blueberry farm. “I didn’t have much knowledge about agri but couldn’t really find any real knowledge anywhere except some high level articles,” he said. “So then I spoke with agronomists and experts, but there were not many in the region because blueberries are not usually grown in Croatia, so I was stuck. I soon realised this was a common problem so I quit my job and found investors to get started with Agrivi.”

Zulj won the World Startup Competition in Seoul, Korea, in 2014, after being recognised as a project with the highest global impact. Forty-six countries nominated one business each to the competition.

Agrivi provides farmers with best practices for over 100 crops. They get a list of tasks to do each season. It includes a database of pests and diseases, weather conditions and when they occur and how to detect the possibility of a pest or disease on their fields. It also suggests supplements farmers can use.

“Our app is really a knowledge-based approach,” he said. “Other apps are just farm management solutions or just analytics to help add more value.”