SparkLabs Accelerator Program Support

Summary

It has been a strong second year of investment with great progress made from this year’s cohort, continued growth from our first cohort and an exciting cohort shaping up for 2020. Our highlights include:

• Investments of over $850k in 7 agtech and foodtech start-ups in 2019.
• 9 promising startups confirmed for the 2020 cohort, with more likely over the coming months, in what will be our biggest year to date.
• Held our second demo day with 550 people, an increase of 100 from our first year in 2018 including a panel position for Dr Michele Allan, MLA Chairperson at the time.
• Strong feedback from our second cohort on the value-added, particularly in farmer, corporate and industry relationships to provide real-time feedback and potential opportunities.
• Participated in events in Israel, London, Australia, the UAE, Korea.
• Established a stretch program to continue to support the most promising companies beyond the program with strategic guidance and funding support
  Ripe partnership with MLA and the Department of Industry established to provide insights around red meat supply chain data flows with industry players including Paraway Pastoral, Jack’s Creek and the North Meat Co-Operative.
• Two mentor catch-ups with the best minds in the agriculture and technology industries.
• SparkLabs Cultiv8 portfolio companies have now raised in excess of $38m in funding following our program.

Three of our companies from 2019 are generating tangible value for the livestock industries. These vary from skills and recruiting (The Training Paddock), rural communications (Zetifi), seed planting and finance (TrAlve).

As an example, The Training Paddock is developing a platform to enable farming skills to be recognized and recorded to enable employers and employees to better align candidates and jobs that can work for them in the long term. To date they have established trials with rural schools, 21 farmers and 3 major agri-companies plus are working through a pilot to enhance WHS and insurance commitments with icare.

Our previous cohort has had an incredible year. Some of these highlights include James Tyler becoming the number one Australian milk brand in China, as well as launching new channels to market to help and solidify its position as the leading route to market for Australian and New Zealand fresh produce to Chinese consumers. Ripe.io are having great success overseas and in Australia and have begun trials with MLA, the Department of Industry to support traceability of Australian beef.

On the back of our reputation and global reach, this coming year is expected to be our strongest yet with 9 companies already confirmed and with more likely over the coming months. We are excited by the strength and diversity of this years cohort and are excited to drive more livestock-related opportunities in the coming years.

We believe the investments to date in global start-ups that can provide the greatest value to Australian ag-tech and livestock has been beneficial. Our focus over the coming months and year is to identify more local talent that we can be supporting. The challenge has been identifying companies that have significant growth potential and can have a real impact both domestically and abroad. We know there are many innovative Australians passionate about the sector and we are testing ways to best identify these people and support them.

This year we have also launched a stretch program to fill the significant gap in support and investment in ag-tech start-ups at the early stages beyond our current accelerator mandate. The purpose of this is to support with strategic guidance, mentorship, commercial introductions and funding to ensure that companies are able to continue growth through to later stages where significantly more industry and venture funding is currently focused. We believe this will also help to solidify the value to Australian livestock of the companies that we invest in. The initial stretch program will include some of the current companies supporting livestock in Australia such as James Tyler, Ripe.io, Farmbot, Zetifi, Traive, The Training Paddock.