Brazilian software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup BemAgro has recently secured a $2.6 million pre-Series A funding round from a consortium of investors, including CNH Industrial, Suzano Ventures, and ATVOS. This follows an earlier $1.8 million pre-Series A round in February, also led by CNH and featuring participation from Rural Ventures, MMAgro, and Agroven. The new capital infusion will enable BemAgro to further develop its innovative SaaS platform for agriculture, with a strategic pivot towards forest management.
BemAgro’s platform leverages advanced image processing, artificial intelligence, and computer vision to monitor crops throughout their growing cycles. The software processes data from tractors and drones to optimize various agricultural tasks such as planting, spraying, and harvesting. It can also detect weeds, generate variable-rate application maps, and identify plant failures. “Our platform consolidates this data into a single place and we provide farmers insights, agronomic reports. Through that, we can help the farmer with better decision making and we are able to increase productivity and reduce costs,” says BemAgro CEO and founder Johann Coelho.
Currently, BemAgro focuses on commodities like corn, soybeans, cotton, and sugarcane across several countries in Latin America and Southeast Asia, including Brazil, Colombia, Paraguay, Thailand, and Indonesia. The inclusion of Suzano Ventures in the recent funding round marks a significant step towards BemAgro’s expansion into the forestry management sector. This aligns with BemAgro’s ambitious goal of monitoring 10 million hectares of land by 2032. Coelho notes that there is substantial demand from forestry companies for technologies like BemAgro’s, which can optimize operations over large areas of land.
Forest management, or silviculture, involves extensive tracts of land, similar to sugarcane plantations. “These corporations are prepared to insert this kind of technology into their daily workflow, [and] because they have technology teams, they are always looking to optimize their operations,” Coelho explains. BemAgro’s platform offers forestry companies the ability to subscribe to software that aids in process planning, control, monitoring, and extracting actionable insights. “The software we have already implemented in sugarcane fields has a similar approach. With sugarcane, you plant one year and harvest for six or seven years in a row. When you think about forestry, you plant one year and harvest in seven, so the crop is very similar.”
Forestry operations often require plant counts to index plant health and quantities, a task traditionally done manually. Coelho highlights that this manual process is both expensive and time-consuming. BemAgro’s platform aims to automate and optimize these procedures using AI, providing more accurate information and faster response times. “We are not looking to replace any procedures, just to be able, through AI, to optimize and automate those processes,” he asserts.
The strategic nature of the investors in this funding round cannot be overstated. CNH is a global equipment manufacturer, while Suzano is one of the largest pulp producers globally, and ATVOS is Brazil’s second-largest ethanol producer. Coelho emphasizes that the choice of investors was deliberate. “Since the beginning, we’ve worried about who we were bringing to the table. We’ve had a lot of proposals from venture capital firms, but we wanted more than the money. For us, it was very important to know exactly where we wanted to go and what we wanted to achieve in the upcoming years.”
Suzano’s involvement is particularly strategic. “When Suzano came to the table, it was a perfect match, because we were able to not just raise the capital [from them], but also count on their expertise and their know-how and have access to their area of production,” Coelho explains. This partnership includes a two-year roadmap to develop five different products, with Suzano providing access to its farms and infrastructure, as well as technical expertise.
Álvaro Gómez Rodríguez, a senior manager at Suzano Ventures, notes, “Our provision of capital, alongside access to Suzano’s farms, operations, and technical expertise, will provide the resources necessary to accelerate the development of BemAgro’s technologies, alongside its adoption across the [agroforestry] sector.” The initial focus will be on eucalyptus and peanut trees, given their similar management needs.
Looking ahead, BemAgro aims to enter the North American and European markets by 2026, marking a significant expansion in its global footprint.