Team
• Who are the key people involved in your project?
• Giovanni D’Agostino, Salvatore Trombetta Corrado Bambini and Francesco Salvati.
• What are their roles?
o Giovanni D’Agostino – CEO
o Salvatore Trombetta – Chief Financial Officer
o Corrado Bambini – COO
o Francesco Salvati – CTO
Need / Problem
• What need or problem does your product or service answerto?
How to increase the competitiveness of farms of any size by providing a platform of services for precision agriculture on different domains: land administration,
irrigation, crop and land monitoring, plant protection, fertilization.
• What are the customer’s pains you’re going to solve?
The growing consumption of water for irrigation, fertilizersand products for plant care, as well as the difficulties relatedto the management of the regulation of Community Agricultural Policies for which it is necessary to fulfil a set of administrative obligations requiring resources at the expenseof overall productivity.
Solution: Our proposal
• How does your product or service address the problem athand?
• Analyzing the sector’s problems, we have developed the idea of using the most modern technologies (MultispectralSatellite Images, Cloud-Computing, Internet of Things and Big Data) and integrate them into a service platform that isable to support farms in making production processes more efficient starting from the automation of administrativepractices, up to the prevention and care of plants.
Application & customer segments
• What applications do you think your product/service couldhave?
The introduction of the first Cloud solution designed to meetthe needs of the agricultural world, able to collect, integrate and process billions of data generated by different sources in the agro-environmental and meteorological domain, througha user-friendly web interface easily accessible.
• Who do you think could be your customers?
Mainly large farms but also medium and small ones.
• Which channels are you planning to use to reach your target customers?
Institutional channels and private investors.
• What are the target regions (e.g. Italy, Europe, World) and how do you plan to reach them? The first year AgriSmartwill be aimed at the Italian market and the second also at the European one. Starting from the third year, AgriSmart in itsmost advanced versions, can also be marketed in non-European countries.
The market: figures & players
• What is your target market?
Precision Farming.
• What is the value of the market you’re targeting?
$ 6.5 BN
• What is the Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of your target market?
The precision agriculture market size is projected to reach $ 23 BN by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 13.4%.
• What are the most significant market drivers and constraints?
The high segmentation of the Italian market which iscomposed by small farms with low levels of investment in innovation and the mistrust in the use of the most modernmethods due to the low technological level of agriculture.
• Who are the key players (companies) active in your target market?
The most important players in the market are US companies (more than 50%), such as Nautilytics and AGData, mainlyoriented in the North American market, while there are only6 companies at European level (less than 7%).
• What is the current research state of the art?
Research and business deals in the US market are veryactive; Italian Universities are also involved in reaserchactivities, in particular the mechatronic center of Trento hasshowed interest in the sector.
Our competitive edge
• Which are your main competitors?
Italian/European startups that are growing in the field of precision agriculture and smart agriculture
• Which are your competitive advantages?
We have gathered the experience gained in recent years in the field of agronomic technological research and we have put ittogether in a single platform of services whose adoptionprovides a competitive advantage for all actors in the production chain.
• What key strengths make your product/service better thanother existing solutions?
At the moment no product on the market reflects the characteristics of AgriSmart and no startup is movingtowards value-added services in precision agriculture, confirming the uniqueness of the AgriSmart initiative.
Current status of project
• What steps have you taken so far?
Market research and technical design; the demo of the platform has already been realized and it can be commercialized within nine months from the beginning of the development.
Intellectual Property position/plans
• Which part of your product/service intellectual property can be considered an asset of the project?
AgriSmart offers decision support systems addressing userneeds and interpretation data support services for cropmanagement, two services that are less covered b
competitors.
• What steps have you taken or are planning to take to protectyour intellectual property? We intend to apply the copy right of the SW and patent the sensors that are being developed.
Road map
• What are the next steps on your road map from a business/ technological point of view? We have developed a three-yearplan for the achievement of the strategic developmentobjectives of the AgriSmart platform and the commercial ones.
I. Year 1: establishment of collaborationagreements with national researchcenters, definition of partnerships with agricultural machine manufacturers
and for validationproductstrategy, marketing start in .
II. Year 2: definition of the strategy of expansion towards European markets and marketing in at least two Europeancountries.
III. Year 3: definition of the strategy of expansion towards non–Europeanmarkets.
What we are looking for
• What resources (funding, people, know-how, facilities, equipment, personnel) are you looking for to move yourproject forward?
o Funding: two rounds of funding will be needed to develop the product and its marketing: 1 MillionEuros in the first year and 1.5 Million Euros in the second year.
o Facilities: Head Quarter.
o Personnel: Sales & Marketing unit responsible for sales, marketing and business development in the target markets has to be create. Administration, Operations and Research & Development unitsmay be considered active but they will need to be strengthened.
Legal
• Does your product/service manage Personal IdentifiableInformation or other Sensitive data?
No, it doesn’t.
