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Farmers Business Network

August 4, 2020

Farmers Business Network Raises $250M

Farmers Business Network (FBN), an ag tech platform and online farmer network, announced yesterday that it has raised a $250 million Series F round of funding. The round was led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, with participation from Baron Capital Group, Balyasny Asset Management, Mandi Ventures, Lupa Systems and Ron Shaich. This brings the total amount of funding raised by FBN to $517.4 million.

Existing investors DBL Partners, Temasek, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., GV, Expanding Capital, and Kleiner Perkins also participated in the round. According to Bloomberg, Farmers Business Network now has a valuation of $1.75 billion.

FBN connects farmers with one another so they can share information on things like seeds, chemical and other inputs to bring more price transparency to the market. The farming sector is not immune from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ability for a farmers to save money on things like agricultural inputs can help farms stay afloat.

According to yesterday’s press announcement, Farmers Business Network now has 12,000 members farming more than 40 million acres across North America. For comparison, when we covered FBN back in Dec. of 2017, the company had 5,000 farmers across 16 million acres.

In addition to providing industry wide price analytics, Farmers Business Network also sells seeds and inputs directly to farmers via its FBN Direct online marketplace. FBN said that it will use the new funding to expand its Direct market as well as develop new FBN Crop Marketing and Financial Services products to help farmers get the most value out of their crops.

April 24, 2018

Agroy Wants to Be the Amazon for Farmers

“Every other product is available online. Why can’t that be available in American agriculture?”

So asks Brad McDonald, co-founder of Agroy, over the phone during a scheduled chat. The question, of course, is rhetorical, since making agricultural products available—and affordable—online is exactly what he and Agroy are doing.

Agroy is an Amazon-like e-commerce platform that lets farmers connect with other farmers and find wholesale products from around the globe. Founder and CEO Jukka Peuranpää started the company in Finland in 2011, and after six successful years of piloting the concept around Europe approached McDonald to start a U.S. version.

The aim is to make the ease, flexibility, and variety of a marketplace like Amazon widely available to whole the agricultural industry, something no one else has done until now. The company’s LinkedIn page calls itself “a price freedom fighter for farmers.”

“The goal is when a farmer logs into their account they can be confident the products are not only the cheapest in their area, they’re the cheapest in the world,” says McDonald, who holds a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

Farmers can sign up for Agroy for free. When a product becomes available in their area, Agroy sends an email with product and pricing information. Farmers can either purchase the item direct through the platform, or simply take the information and use it as extra negotiating muscle elsewhere.

Agroy, meanwhile, negotiates with companies on the price at which goods are sold as well as areas where those goods will be available. The more suppliers Agroy can add, the more farmers it will be able to reach.

Right now products include things like fertilizer, chemicals, and seed. Agroy has also provided animal feed and even pigs in the past. The overarching goal, says McDonald, is to “provide any product a farmer writes a check for.”

So, for example, a farmer in Texas might log into their account be able to find and buy fertilizer from Iowa for a better price than they would find in their own locality.

“By utilizing e-commerce, we lose a lot of the fixed costs the current system has to pay for,” McDonald explains. “Farmers are no longer restrained to only purchasing with their neighbors, but can now make purchases with farmers across the country by purchasing online.”

McDonald himself is a farmer. After working with Rabobank and Bunge, McDonald headed back to his native Iowa because he saw an opportunity: “Most of the people I associate with are farmers. When I first started, no one, including myself, knew of a website where you log on to make ag [agriculture] input purchases. I saw this as a niche in the market.”

The concept has so far been well received in the U.S., according to McDonald, who calls Agroy “a very easy sell.” He adds that most people are shocked no such platform has existed before. Farmers Business Network, for example, has an e-commerce wing, but its main sell is giving farmers the ability to democratize farm data. Access to anything, including the e-commerce element, costs a farmer $600 annually.

Meanwhile, Agroy launched a branch in India recently, and continues to have a presence in Europe. In its native Finland, 8 percent of the agricultural land purchases products through Agroy. The company is currently looking at Brazil and Central America as the next couple places to expand to.

It will be interesting to see where the platform is at in five or even two years time. The network runs across millions of acres of farmland in the U.S. alone right now. With no real competition breathing down its neck, where and how this company expands in the coming years seems virtually limitless right now.

December 2, 2017

Farmers Business Network Raises $110 Million Series D Round

Farmers Business Network, an online platform for farmers to share analytics, purchase materials and sell their product, announced today that it has raised a $110 million Series D round of funding. This latest money will go towards bolstering its existing services as well as international expansion.

For a $600 a year subscription, Farmers Business Network (FBN) provides a number of digital services that allow farmers to connect with one another and share their data. By aggregating this information, FBN allows farmers to learn about various farm optimization techniques, and creates price transparency for inputs such as seed and fertilizer.

FBN also has a both end e-comerce platform that not only sells inputs directly to farmers, but can also serve as a marketing service selling farmers’ outputs directly to food buyers.

FBN Co-Founder and VP of Product, Charles Baron told AgFunder News that FBN’s membership is “doubling” year over year and currently has roughly 5,000 member farms across 16 million acres. Baron also said the company wants to remain independent and expects to go public in 2 – 5 years.

Ag retailers are not necessarily as thrilled by the success of FBN, however. CropLife reports complaints among retailers include FBN cutting into already thin margins, and questioning whether it can sustain as a long-term business. Having said that, these same retailers agreed that FBN can’t be ignored.

FBN’s Series D was led by two institutional investors: T. Rowe Price and Singapore state fund Tamasek. The company has raised $200 million to date.

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