Technology is rapidly transforming the food and agriculture landscape and your competitors are not sitting around waiting to be disrupted. You can't afford to wait. To survive in a decade from now every company will need to become a technology company and that change needs to start today. If you act swiftly and start incorporating technology and innovation as part of your corporate DNA you can emerge as a winner. If you wait risk the future of your business. Yes, this will require investment, but the size of that investment pales in comparison to what you can lose. You need a strategy to get close to the best startups that are transforming your industry. If you don't get to them first, your competitors will.
To navigate this landscape corporations have traditionally had two options to get closer to startups:
1. Set up an office in Silicon Valley and start your own Corporate Venture Capital fund. But staffing a professional venture team will cost you $1M+/year with at least a year of lead time. On top of that you'll want to $5M+ annually for investment.
2. Invest as a strategic Limited Partner in a Venture fund. Typically this is requires at least a $10M fund investment, which gives you exposure to the startups the VC sees and invests in, plus some modest time with the fund managers, for which you'll pay $200k or more in annual management fees.
But now there's another solution which we call Venture Capital as a Service.
Leveraging our investment infrastructure we can bring you the cutting edge of the foodtech and agtech innovation. As one of the most active foodtech and agtech venture capital investors globally we review and meet with nearly up to 200 startups each month. To manage this kind of deal flow, we built Gaia, our machine learning platform that helps us identify and evaluate early stage foodtech and agtech startups. Built on a knowledge base of nearly 30,000 startups, Gaia web crawls millions of webpages to help us identify and classify new opportunities. It track 50-200 new transactions each month, discovers 10-40 never-before-classified companies each week, and provides ranking guidance to help us prioritize our time to help ensure that we're seeing the best opportunities.
To build this kind infrastructure and establish our level of brand awareness in the startup community by yourself would be hard and expensive, but now corporates can leverage our expertise and our platform to help your company navigate the startup landscape. Whether it's with help setting up or managing your Corporate Venture Capital Program, or tech scouting for startup partners that can solve your pressing problems, AgFunder can help.
To speak directly with an AgFunder principal email: [email protected]