About

At Centaur, we are passionate about protecting quality, enabling abundance and reducing waste. Founded by leading experts and entrepreneurs in the fields of electronics, agronomy and cognitive technologies, Centaur is the leading provider of turnkey SaaS solutions for quality and abundance of agricultural products. Centaur is proud to deliver award-winning, innovative IoT technology and advanced analytics to transform the traditional supply chain into a state-of-the-art, trusted quality chain. Our clientele includes leading companies in agriproducts and foods. Our company was founded in 2014. We are a team of 20 people. We are providing solutions to more than 25 countries globally & have served 70+ clients across the globe to date. Centaur has raised a total of $5M through its pre-seed & seed rounds. Our vision is to become the leading traceable quality platform for sustainable supply chains. Our mission is to dramatically reduce the estimated $1 trillion of post-harvest crop value loss annually from farm to shelf, by deploying our cognitive connected solutions in the global supply chain.

Solution & Product

Centaur provides software solutions to transform today's grain & cereal bulk supply chain into a trusted, end-to-end, post-harvest quality chain. Centaur's Internet-of-Crops® brings artificial intelligence and sensors to wherever grains are stored across the ag and food supply chain. Our sensors are wirelessly connected and able to monitor in the most extreme environments. Using the data collected from sensors, our system creates a Digital Twin to predict, in advance, how the crops being stored are performing. Our customer's value our solution because we bring visibility, quality control, sustainability, and traceability into the food supply chain. Are stored crops subject to mold, spoilage, aflatoxin, or other food safety issues? If so, the system recommends remedial measures to the Operators to avoid and mitigate problems. The system can monitor nearly any storage environment which is used. For the grain supply chain, this is typically bulk storage, such as in a silo, warehouse, pile, ship hold, container, or bag. By having sensors inside these storage environments, coupled with our platform pulling in massive amounts of other information about ambient conditions, weather, wind, solar radiation, cloud cover, movements, etc., we can effectively model what is happening inside using our agronomic models. To our knowledge, we are the only company able to apply CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamic) digital modeling in this manner at scale for agriculture.

Innovation & Scalability

Centaur’s solutions bring turnkey, state of the art technology into the food supply chain, to provide quality & abundance of agricultural products. It all starts with the use of interconnected sensors of our own design, which monitor the products from the moment of storage (insecticide control, air quality & composition, humidity, temperature, etc.) until the moment they reach the shelf. By doing so, we give the power to the producers to monitor the storage conditions of the products in real time, from the comfort of their office or home, avoiding a physical visit to the storage area for manual measurements. In addition, with the help of Artificial Intelligence and our "digital twin" model, we can detect spoilage early on, over a period of several months and send timely alerts to "prevent" any losses, while giving the user the appropriate instructions for the protection of goods. This way, we are able to extend the shelf-life of their products, increasing their sustainability and profitability.

Traction & achievements

Centaur was founded in 2014. Since then, we have raised a total of $5M through our pre-seed & seed rounds from Investors in Greece, Israel and the USA. We have deployed this equity into taking our product to the next level through R&D and into sales development. Today, Centaur already serves more than 70 clients in 25+ countries, across all 5 continents. Our plan is to be serving 1,000 clients globally, by 2025. We have been awarded the Global Grain Winner award in 2018 & the Solar Impulse Efficient Solution award in 2021. Since being founded, we have also managed to establish important synergies, both commercial and academic, like: - Global Sourcing Program of ΑΒ InBev: We are part of the supplier network of their #1 Brewery - InVivo Quest Laureate: We are a selected technology provider in the largest European cooperative network - We are a solution provider for the Research program of USDA ARS - We are participating in research programs with the University of Thessaly - We have a research partnership with Green Storage in Israel

Team & Why Us

Centaur was founded in 2014 by Vasilis Sotiroudas (Agronomist, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) & Sotiris Bantas (Dr. in Electrical & Computer Engineering, Microelectronics, National Technical University of Athens). Sotiris was also the co-founder of Helic (Innovative company of EDA software), which was founded in Athens & ultimately acquired from USA-based, publicly listed ANSYS, in one of the biggest acquisitions in the Greek tech startup ecosystem. Vasilis has a global experience on Food Safety, having worked with multiple multi-national organizations on Insecticide & Food Safety issues. Furthermore, Avi Reichental (former CEO of 3D Systems) was a founding investor and is now the Chairman of Centaur, who has also shared his own vision around the adoption of exponential technologies. Along with Avi, our team has envisioned Centaur from the first moment, as a company that utilizes Artificial Intelligence and cloud infrastructure in order to provide new, innovative predictive tools for every agricultural product provider. Centaur is comprised from a wide team with a diverse background. The team is led by: Apostolos “Toli” Lerios on Software (Formerly with Microsoft, Facebook, among others), Dr. Ronal Ham on Hardware (Formerly with Wipro, BAE, Texas Instruments, among others). The entire Centaur team consists of well-trained individuals in the fields of data science, software engineering, electronic engineering & mechanical engineering.

Funding Needs

Centaur has raised $5M through its pre-Seed and Seed rounds to date and is always interested to discuss its ongoing growth with investors.