“Yesterday was a big day for us”, reads on the 18th of September the blog of Connecterra, one of the startups that have been selected for the FIWARE Accelerator Programme by Smart AgriFood. “At our first ever startup pitch event”, it continues, “Connecterra walked away with top honors with the maximum reward on offer […] Organized by Smart AgriFood, an EU sponsored AgTech accelerator, we beat 48 AgTech startups across Europe to be placed in the top 3 that share top rewards. This is a significant endorsement of our technology, approach and team for which we are proud and grateful to the organizers.”
Less than a month later, the team of Connecterra would win the Alpha Pitch at Web Summit. In its blog, the team of Web Summit shows a brief interview that they made to the winners, proving how humble they are when speaking about their work. “They like to say that they’re the ‘Fitbit for cows’.”, says this blog, “This Amsterdam-based startup’s product can analyse real-time movement data of cattle to help improve farm productivy.” According to this interview, one of the main disadvantages that the team considered that they had, in comparison with other startups, is the fact that their product is not consumer-facing and that not anyone without knowledge about the dairy industry could understand properly what it is.
Connecterra has developed a sensor that measures the activity of a cow in 3D space and by leveraging its deep learning algorithms can detect various behaviors such as walking, eating, ruminating etc. This information is then modeled to provide farmers with health insights which help them reduce labor input and improve animal health resulting in higher productivity from each cow. In addition to providing farmers with insights, their platform also enables veterinarians to observe herd data and provide suggestions to farmers on improving farm practices. This helps democratize farmer knowledge to those that need it most and especially in developing countries.
Connecterra believes the dairy service will help farmers increase productivity per animal by up to 20 % or more. This is the first such service available to dairy farmers which focuses on generating meaning from data and providing farmers with specific, actionable insights versus ‘more data’.
“I think that Connecterra”, said the founder of the startup for the blog of Web Summit, “will have big impact on real-world problems that can be solved with technology but came with an open mind to the pitch.” According to him, thanks to PITCH, they are raising a first round of $2.1 million now. This will help them talk to investors; it gets them global attention.
We hope to keep hearing great news from them, as it’s their stories which build our own.
