Today, Copenhagen-based Agreena has announced its acquisition of UK-based Hummingbird Technologies. It’s a move that reflects the influence that tech startups are having in fueling the green transition and sustainability across Europe.
Carbon offsetting and reaching more sustainable approaches to all aspects of life is now firmly on the agenda across the world. The farming and agriculture sector is seen as one of the largest polluters of carbon, and one of the industries that need tech approaches to fuel the green transition.
Copenhagen-based Agreena is one of Europe’s pioneering platforms facilitating the issuing and trading of carbon certificates. It’s just acquired Hummingbird Technologies – a UK-based firm providing advanced remote sensing analytics to improve the sustainability of the agri-food sector. The two companies have collaborated together in the past, with his new deal coming as an aligned strategic move.
With this new chapter in their partnership, Agreena puts key resources – financial and commercial – into the development of Hummingbird’s MRV (monitoring, reporting & verification) technology, a crucial innovation that helps create trustworthiness around soil carbon certificates.
Agreena: A growing marketplace
Founded in 2018, Agreena started out life as a digital trading platform, intended to make grains trading more democratic and efficient. It has grown to become one of the first platforms across Europe to facilitate issuing and trading of carbon certificates for farmers and is now serving 13 countries in Europe. The AgreenaCarbon programme follows the crop year and thus allows the farmers to reap the value of their climate efforts on an annual basis.
Having access to carbon reporting tools and certificates is a crucial part of farmers being able to take necessary and relevant climate action, each doing their part to help Europe’s green transition. The Copenhagen-based startup is supporting farmers’ transition to regenerative agriculture – made by farmers and fintech experts for farmers.
Hummingbird Technologies: Regenerative agriculture
Since 2016, Hummingbird Technologies has been enabling regenerative agriculture through data science. The AI-based SaaS platform uses deep learning and computer vision techniques along with proprietary algorithms to provide actionable insights to farmers and agri-businesses. It provides advanced remote sensing data to help farmers identify early problems in crops, such as crop health, disease risk and detection, weed mapping, yield prediction, and more.
It’s, therefore, able to give the agriculture industry much-needed tools to optimise processes whilst minimizing environmental impacts. The platform was developed by Will Wells with this vision – to alleviate the climate burden of intensive farming and food production through tech.
Alexander Jevons, CEO of Hummingbird Technologies: “Hummingbird and Agreena were early pioneers in what is now a thriving regenerative agriculture economy. Our complementary technologies have enabled this market to take off, and as such, this is the perfect match. Our companies’ partnership-turned-marriage is a natural progression in a maturing and fastgrowing industry and a great step forward for society and farmers, who can sell the certificates and thus finance their green transition.”
The Acquisition
It’s a merger that strengthens Agreena’s value chain, underlining the company’s international leading position within the agricultural sector for soil carbon certification.
Merging the two companies’ technology capabilities and bringing Hummingbird’s AI-based verification in-house to Agreena is just the beginning and jointly, the teams will be delivering innovative new tech solutions for the agriculture industry and soil carbon markets.
Simon Haldrup, co-founder and CEO of Agreena: “Agreena is on a mission to enable an international regenerative agriculture movement, and this market-leading MRV solution can deliver a massive scalable impact. We have been thoroughly investigating advanced technology solutions and working towards enhancing our protocol since day one – and with this acquisition, we are not only scaling, but also adding new tech perspectives to the development of agriculture.”
The purchase will result in a company with more than 80 combined employees. Agreena has been operating its soil carbon program in 13 countries throughout the pan-European market, and the new acquisition will build its operational capacity to the Americas and Australia.
