About

farmB company was founded with a vision to close the gap between technological research and everyday practices in the agricultural sector. farmB offers technological solutions for all types of agri-businesses (from producers to consultants and processors) and focuses on the development IoT and AI applications for the holistic assessment of the information collected in field from sensors, drones, electronic pest traps, meteorological stations, agricultural vehicles and more. Αs a spin-off company of the Institute for Bio-economy and Agri-technology (IBO) of the Centre for Research and Technology – Hellas (CERTH), incorporates deep scientific knowledge into its operations, while promoting the integration of sustainability and circularity into the agricultural practice.

Solution & Product

farmB provides a single stop access point in contrast to the highly fragmented landscape of digital tools in the Agri-Industry. farmB covers digital agriculture from satellite imagery to proprietary in-house developed algorithms creating meta-products based on data collected from users, sensors, and any other source. The core product is accessed by the web app and functionalities are grouped in eight major modules, interconnected and able to receive data from an extended array of sources. farmb.view offers an overview of assets available to the user; farmb.eye visualizes data on plot-level and allows for comprehensive assessment of operational status. farmb.sat integrates processed satellite data, providing grounded scientific decision support; farmb.clima offers reliable climatological data, from shared data sources and/or private sensor networks; farmb.fleet is a bridge between actionable information of the platform and machinery (conventional, latest gen and robotics), assisting and enhancing field operations; farmb.insta enables accurate visual geo-referenced data exchange amongst farmB users; farmb.prox is the interface handling proximal data regarding soil and yield; and last, farmb.log, a fully digitized cultivation log that covers all recording needs in detail, utilizing data already in the system and generating valuable meta-data. farmB is further enhanced and enriched by mobile applications in both Android and iOS, developed with focus on the in-field use case.

Innovation & Scalability

Our innovational offering is based on two core pillars; The holistic approach of covering the needs in digital agriculture and our deep knowledge of both the technological and the physical problem. These two directives lead to the development of an innovative user interface that enables effective, targeted and grounded communication between the multitude of actors involved in Agri-Business. It also allows us to develop innovative algorithmic and AI-based metadata products that have never before been seen in the agricultural processes. Combined with a hands-on approach and delivery of actionable information to the machinery operating on-site, farmB offers a complete ecosystem for digitally enabled agriculture. Our system is based on a distributed network of cloud-based services, enabling us to easily allocate additional resources as demand grows. Our firm belief in open data formats allows us to integrate with any system that can further exploit our value proposition and to also transform our metadata products to any proprietary data format needed by IP protected systems.

Traction & achievements

In our still young lifecycle, we have achieved to advance from pilot runs to completing development & deployment of our first generation of services and to deploying the second generation of services in the current season. This has led to an exponential growth in adoption rates from end-users in every link of the agri-production-chain. From farmers to contract-farming organizations and from agri-consultants to global agri-chem industries. We have achieved to already provide services in every region of Greece and to have commercial users in Italy and Spain. In parallel academic institutions in UK, Denmark and Italy have shown great interest to integrate the platform in their actions. Furthermore, we are research and development services providers as partners in two Horizon funded programmes and have been approached to contribute to research proposals of similar scientific and innovative importance.

Team & Why Us

Our team includes an multidisciplinary array of scientific collaborators that cover the technical aspects from Computer Science to Agronomists and Bio-Systems Engineering and from Product Development Strategic Design to Environmental and Sustainability Management. Our team is able to highlight and identify all salient factors in any production system. Furthermore, we can analyze the needs and requirements in order to define the engineering needs for delivering a solution based on current and emerging technological frameworks. The advantage of having an in-house team that can explore the solution space in multiple dimensions and simultaneously develop and deploy the targeted solution gives us the ability to build upon the collected data and compile innovative metadata products. Our strategic approach is to both make data accessible and interconnected in a unified interface and to also investigate and generate value in an inherently multicriteria based decision support system.

Funding Needs

The company is currently deploying Gen2 of its services and needs to be able to fund collaborators and resources that they can use. In this light, our potential funding will be spent in competitive salary offerings to professionals that can collaborate with our core team to increase capacity in deployment, deliverance and ultimately realization of our strategic goals. A secondary need linked to the above statement is of resources needed for implementing and integrating the work ahead. An indicative list of needed resources is computing clusters, cloud services of 3rd party service providers, hardware and software needs for both the software development team as well as the on-site scientific staff and the engineering team. Finally, farmB needs funding to deploy people and resources towards participation in major events of the industry and raise awareness of the product.