According to a recent announcement, Farmnote Holdings, an IoT solutions provider for dairy and livestock farming, has procured a new investment of 500 million yen, or about $4,580,000, in funding from four companies: Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, the National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations, the Norinchukin Bank and Sumitomo Corporation. The investment reportedly will be used to strengthen the company’s business, and bring its overall total investments procured to just over 1 billion yen, or about $9 million.
Farmnote said it’s been working to expand sales and enhance the functions of its Farmnote cloud-based cattle management system, and develop and market its Farmnote Color wearable device, which collects real-time data on cattle activities. Sales have grown by nearly 30 times over the past three years, with the number of users rising to 1,600 farms for a contracted number of 160,000 heads of cattle.
Farmnote will be using this latest injection of funds to invest in R&D and to enhance its business infrastructure, with the goal of improving the productivity and competitiveness of its clients, including dairy and livestock farmers.
Farmnote plans to leverage Sumitomo Corporation’s extensive overseas network to deploy its Japanese dairy and livestock cattle management systems to the rest of the world and hopefully contribute to the global livestock industry, the release said. The company will also look beyond dairy and livestock farming to develop a platform for tillage that can extend agricultural ICT fostered in Japan globally.
The company is also working on a partnership for joint development and dissemination of system platforms and sensor devices to improve the incomes of farm producers through the use of ICT. A business partnership was also concluded recently with NTT (News - Alert) DOCOMO, which will assist the efforts of ZEN-NOH and Farmnote.
Finally, the money will also help expand Farmnote Lab, the company’s existing research arm for AI and IoT applications in agriculture, extend Farmnote Connect, an integrated API for agricultural data, already in use, and construct an integrated platform to optimize agriculture.