Despite turbulent times due to Covid-19, Dutch impact investors, Pymwymic (Put Your Money Where Your Meaning Is Community) have teamed up with strategic partner Kubota Corporation and Italian based impact investor, Oltre Venture in a Series A2 round totaling €3.7m for Trapview, a technology leader in automated pest monitoring and forecasting.
Pests destroy approximately 14% of all annual crop production each year. In addition, almost 5 million tons of more than 600 different pesticide types are applied to fight pests, of which astonishingly only 1% is actually effective. The overuse of chemical pesticides is evident, and furthermore pests are becoming more and more resistant to them creating pressure on farmers. This is resulting in a demand for more effective, reliable and efficient pest monitoring solutions. With the automated pest monitoring system provided by Trapview, farmers are not only reducing their use of chemicals, but also decreasing the cost for healthier food produce, allowing healthy, pesticide-free food to become more accessible.
Originally founded in 2007 in Slovenia as an IT and R&D company, Trapview holds an expertise in monitoring of pests. With thousands of traps deployed in fields, the company currently owns the largest database of pest data and algorithms in the world. Currently they have over 1,300 unique customers in more than 40 countries spread over Europe, Australia, North and South America including maJor players such as Syngenta, Bonduelle, Adama and PepsiCo to name a few.
Over recent years, Trapview has been growing steadily, making several strategic decisions to switch from a pure technological company, to a more customer-centric company. Amongst others driven by this shift, the company doubles sales continuously for the last years. This has enabled them to now reach this maJor milestone in a successful investment round - even during the Covid-19 crisis.
This consortium now with Kubota Corporation, Oltre Venture completing the syndicate, brings strong added value besides the growth capital. The strategic positioning of Kubota in agricultural equipment manufacturing will allow Trapview to benefit new ways of product development, while the local presence of Oltre in the core market for Trapview, Italy, will provide new access to local clients.
Pymwymic have since 2019 already been active impact investors in Trapview. Their role has been strongly to embed impact into the day to day operations, help with impact KPI measurements, as well as to support the Trapview team with scaleup and phases to come.
"We see Trapview as a disruptive breakthrough towards more sustainable farming. Since we invested in them, the leadership team has shown strong compassion to create a system which feeds people with more healthy food while keeping environmental boundaries into account. We believe that with the new partners Joining Trapview, it will be able to further catalyze its impact and continue on the envisaged growth path," Rogier Pieterse, Managing Director of Pymwymic.
"After our successful investment in Sfera Agricola, the largest hydroponic technological greenhouse in Italy for the sustainable cultivation of vegetables, our investment in Trapview is a further example of our vision regarding impact investing: we want to finance "solutions" that can be able to affect positively the sector in which they operate, creating a value chain equally distributed among all the stakeholders," Lorenzo Allevi, Managing Director of Oltre Venture.
