Tenacious Ventures backs agtech firm with $1.5M investment

Tenacious Ventures has backed agtech and fintech startup Geora in a $1.5 million seed round joining NAB Ventures and Flying Fox Ventures.  

This investment is aimed to expand the group’s blockchain platform for farmers and agri-supply chains.

The $1.5 million in seed capital will help bring a range of finance solutions into the Geora platform through relationships with key banking partners and the blockchain ecosystem.

Geora’s platform is the first SaaS blockchain platform in agriculture linking traceability data with financing solutions using simple, no-code digital tools.

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According to Bridie Ohlsson, co-founder of Geora, to meet global sustainable development goals investment along supply chains must increase by at least $2.1 trillion per annum.

“Our investors understand the enormous opportunity to service Australia’s agribusiness industry, and the need to innovate in how we invest in agriculture so that we can support farmers in making food and fibre production more sustainable, efficient and secure."

“While agri-supply chains have been heralded as the killer application for blockchain since late 2017, the tech has, in many ways, failed to live up to its promises. Blockchain solutions have been largely too technical and too expensive for those who really stand to benefit from them — potential users like the 570 million farmers globally who are critically responsible for being more sustainable across all parts of their operations,” Ohlsson adds.

Founded in 2019, Geora leverages traditional banking and blockchain ecosystems to provide sustainable trade and finance solutions to farmers globally.

Tenacious Ventures said it sees Geora as the base layer for delivering finance to farmers in a data-centric world.

Matthew Pryor, general partner at Tenacious Ventures said a digitally native agrifood supply chain enables major new economic opportunities.

“Geora is providing the building blocks for a new generation of supply chain finance solutions,” he said.

Geora said it is leading the charge away from pilots toward commercial products in the agri-blockchain space.

From tracking sustainable rayon production in Indonesia, to smallholder pig farmers in Papua New Guinea, and large grain operations in New South Wales, Geora’s customers use a standard set of digital tools available in the Geora platform on a monthly subscription basis.

Information from the farm and along the supply chain is aggregated to a single asset record, stored as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) on the Geora platform, a permissioned Ethereum-based blockchain.

A broader technical ecosystem including integrations with agtech providers such as John Deere helps maintain data integrity to solve the “rubbish in rubbish out” problem commonly associated with blockchain technology.

Geora is currently growing its remote team, with roles available in the core developer and product nodes operating out of Sydney and Singapore.

Geora provides simple and secure technology for farmer networks to track and finance agri-supply chains. Co-founders Bridie Ohlsson and Cadel Watson have been working at the junction of blockchain and agriculture since 2015.