$25bn
was invested in agritech businesses in 2015
Investment by companies and venture capitalists in agritech businesses is rising rapidly, reaching $25bn in 2015. According to Goldman Sachs Group, this is just the start of a major upswing, and the investment company estimates that the sector could be worth $240bn by 2050. A fertile market.
The growth of the agritech industry is being caused by two key drivers: necessity and technological advancement. Macroeconomic trends in population growth are pushing up demand, while pressures on resources such as water and land usage are forcing farmers to produce more with less. Furthermore, agriculture now accounts for about 30 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, and is a prime target for countries seeking to achieve their carbon reduction targets.
These pressures have grown at the same time as the arrival of a range of new hardware technologies, the separation of computing power from desktops (virtualisation), and cloud computing. The creation of ‘big data’ and the ability to analyse this data to create efficiencies and wholly new ways of working, has the potential to be revolutionary. Underlining these developments has been improved connectivity.