Adatos, a provider of Artificial Intelligence-driven remote sensing analysis for agriculture and carbon markets, has announced the closing of its Series A round with undisclosed investment from Malaysia’s Genting Plantations.
As per a statement, the funding will enable Singapore- and Netherlands-based Adatos to foray into the palm oil and other agriculture sectors and strengthen its carbon measuring capabilities.
Founded in 2015 by CEO Jonathan Paul and CTO Drew Perez, Adatos uses AI to analyse complicated open-source satellite data sets to give operational and strategic insights for agriculture and the fast-growing multi-trillion dollar carbon markets.
Adatos claims its solution results in higher agricultural yields, effective fertiliser use, and better pest and disease surveillance. The use of remote sensing also speeds up and lowers the cost of carbon measurement in natural forests and peat soils.
The startup boasts that it has worked on over 150 use cases and analysed over 400 million hectares of assets for clients in agricultural production, food processing, forestry, and natural resource management.
Also read: Green for good: 9 agritech startups in Southeast Asia fighting deforestation
Adatos plans to keep developing new applications across agriculture, including remote yield estimation and crop macronutrient measurement. It also expands into international carbon asset monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) services, including remotely assessing peat depth and above-ground biomass at scale.
“Since our investment in 2016, Adatos has demonstrated profitable use cases for advanced AI from agriculture to sustainability,” said Paul Santos, Managing Partner of Wavemaker Partners, an early investor in Adatos.
Genting Plantations, a subsidiary of Genting Berhard, owns extensive land banks and oil mills in Malaysia and Indonesia and is making inroads into manufacturing downstream palm-based products. It focuses on the use of precision agriculture to leverage its operational performance.
“Our investment in Adatos and the deployment of its cutting-edge AI will place GENP at the forefront of the Agricultural Technology revolution,” said Tan Kong Han, CEO of Genting Plantations.
According to the Asian Development Bank Institute’s paper series in 2019, emission pricing was worth US$50 billion in 2016 with growing global interest in carbon trading programmes. The number of carbon markets has also doubled since 2012.
Singapore is working towards the “30 by 30” goal to build up the agri-food industry’s capability and capacity to produce 30 per cent of nutritional needs locally and sustainably by 2030. Since then, collaboration to accelerate the growth of AgriTech businesses has gained traction.
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Image credit: Adatos
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