Farmers Business Network cultivates $40 million to help farmers buy seeds at favorable prices

GV (previously identified as Google Ventures) and DBL Companions co-led a $40 million financial commitment in Farmer’s Company Community, Inc., the firm declared on Tuesday. FBN started off as some thing of a qualified network for farmers and other agronomists. It permitted men and women functioning in agriculture to anonymously share details about what they had been paying for seeds, fertilizers and other “inputs” that they want to raise nutritious crops. It also permitted them to trade details about the success of all of these goods.

Bringing crowdsourced, price transparency and products details to the marketplace would help farmers negotiate for honest selling prices, FBN founder Amol Deshpande believed. The firm promises to be saving farmers up to fifty per cent on all the inputs they obtain through the site’s support FBN Direct.

Formerly identified as FBN Procurement, FBN Direct lets consumers to obtain 500 unique farm chemical substances, fertilizers, seeds and seed treatment plans, at selling prices they set them selves. They inform FBN what price they are eager to spend, and then the tech startup goes out to attain what they want at that recognized price. Farmer-associates of FBN can opt to pick up their supplies at a close by warehouse, or have them delivered to their farm.

Alongside with GV and DBL Companions, investors in FBN’s Sequence C spherical of funding involved Bow Cash and FBN’s earlier backers, Acre Undertaking Companions and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). Undertaking capitalists have increasingly plowed funding into agriculture tech deals ever due to the fact the sale of Weather Corp. to Monsanto for about $one billion in 2013. The existence of significant, acquisitive corporations and the uptake of technologies like drones, robotics and sensors by farmers are all driving the financial commitment craze.

The new funding for FBN delivers the company’s overall cash raised to $88 million. Final summer time it declared a $twenty million spherical led by Acre.

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