FarmTrace: Investors bet on agritech solution

Investors have shown confidence in a South Africa-developed agritechfarm solution, FarmTrace, which provides farmers with cloud software to complement their operational requirements. The company is the only cloud-based farm management tool that offers a diverse range of tools to help farmers manage their operations.

The FarmTrace software integrates all production activities into a single management platform, enabling farmers to monitor and control their operations from anywhere in the world.

Secha Capital and Hassium Capital have announced a large equity investment in FarmTrace, which will grow the company’s capacity and ensure continued customer success. The investment will also ensure that it can help farmers position their operations profitably for generations to come, unlocking sustainable growth in the local agribusiness sector by increasing exports, increasing local employment and reducing food waste.

Brendan Mullen, managing director of Secha Capital, said, “We’ve met with many agritech companies that treated agriculture as a homogenous sector and were not built with the farmer in mind. The FarmTrace team knows the key pain points in farming operations and developed a solution to solve them.”

Hassium Capital managing director Howard Saffy expressed his excitement in being able to support FarmTrace on their journey, saying, “The team has done an amazing job in building a highly satisfied client base across a variety of horticulture crops, working hand-in-hand with farmers to develop solutions to meet their exact needs. We are excited to be able to support them on the journey and look forward to being part of the growth here in South Africa and beyond.”

FarmTrace digitises farmers’ manual practices into actionable data and makes them more efficient, productive and profitable.

The system provides management with an accurate, holistic, and live view of their full farming operation to improve yields and increase efficiencies across all aspects of the farm.

Farmers delight in the customization the system offers as it fits into their existing processes, rather than forcing them to change what they have already developed.

Jacques du Plessis, FarmTrace co-founder and CEO said, “FarmTrace started in 2015 and we have boot-strapped exponential growth by working intimately with our clients to solve their needs. We have a long back-log of interested farms, so we decided to raise capital to accelerate our growth and meet the needs of more farmers by hiring additional software developers, engineers, project managers and implementation consultants.”

Werner Lategan, FarmTrace co-founder and COO, added, “With this capital, FarmTrace will bring about the next wave of farming cost savings, yield and efficiency improvements. We will serve more farms, more products and more geographies and ensure that we can help farms grow sustainably and profitably.”

Modern farming is evolving rapidly, through increased demand, changes in best practices, or regulation – all of which require the modern farm manager to keep up to date with the latest data on their farm.

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