Rabo Food & Agri Innovation Fund invests in TeleSense Series B round

The Rabo Food & Agri Innovation Fund (RFAIF) announces its seventh investment of 2020 with a follow-on investment in the EUR 10.2m Series B financing round of US-based portfolio company TeleSense, investing alongside Finistere Ventures, Fulcrum Global Capital, UPL, Mindset Ventures and Artesian. The company also added Søren Wølck Schrøder (former CEO of Bunge), and Mark Palmquist (CEO of United Malt and former CEO of GrainCorp) to its Board of Directors.

RFAIF has continued its growth in recent months by adding new investments as well as supporting its current portfolio with follow-ons. Richard O’Gorman (MD of RFAIF): “Despite Covid-19, we have expanded our activity by adding exciting breakthrough food and agri disruptors to the portfolio. Telesense has made great progress since the Series A, and is at present rolling out commercially on several continents. With a strong investor syndicate and experienced names joining the board, we look forward to scaling the company further.”

Naeem Zafar, CEO of Telesense commented: “TeleSense was fortunate to have Rabobank as an early investor, joining the company at the Series A round in 2018. From the start, they have been engaged, helpful and supportive. Now that our company is in scaling mode, we look forward to engaging further with the richest network of growers worldwide who rely on Rabobank for financial services. There is a lot of synergy and common ground on how Rabobank supports their ag-centric clients and how TeleSense products provide technology to improve the grower’s bottom line through data-driven decision making and preventing post-harvest grain losses”.

This funding round enables the company to further scale to meet surging demand for its solutions that digitizes the post-harvest grain supply chain. Utilizing advanced IoT, real-time environmental monitoring, and cloud-based AI technology, the company helps major grain players to mitigate spoilage, reduce quality degradation, reduce energy costs and increase worker safety. Meeting the differing accessibility and scalability demands of both advanced and emerging economies, TeleSense helps manage key risks in the world’s perishable commodities supply chain. Its machine learning algorithms provide users with the smart alerts they need to effectively manage and predict grain quality, eliminate human error, ensure safety, improve operational efficiency, and increase profitability.

“Telesense is a demonstrated leader in the space and is aligned to  our mission and activity since we first supported it in 2018. The Telesense original vision to digitize the grain supply chain is being realized. The technology is more widely adopted and there is a growing consensus in the sector on the value proposition and the market need,” added Richard O’Gorman. “Bringing accelerated and sustainable efficiency to the food supply chain is a central theme in the investments we make.”