UCD spin-out Proveye closes €1m seed funding round

Agtech start-up Proveye has closed a €1 million seed funding round to further develop its product offering and grow its customer base.

The round was led by Inspire Investments, the private investment arm of Waystone’s management team, and Enterprise Ireland.

Proveye, which offers remote sensing image analysis for agriculture, is targeting agricultural advisers, fertiliser and pesticide suppliers and food processors with its offering. Its system aims to provide accurate information about productivity and sustainability on agricultural land. It can enhance and compile selected image types into a single view, correcting for weather conditions, sunlight and other factors, providing companies with a more accurate understanding of crop growth performance. The software-as-a-service platform combines image processing from remote sensing sources such as satellites, drones and ground-based sensors with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

“This investment comes at a time of rapid growth for the company as we demonstrate the value of a new generation of image-based analytics in agriculture,” said Jerome O’Connell, chief executive and founder of Proveye. “Our talented team is working with some of the leading names in the agriculture industry to solve challenges previously out of reach to substantially increase certainty and accuracy in management decisions at the field, farm and even regional scale.”

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The company plans to develop further solutions across grassland, arable crops, and move into more specialist areas of UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) image processing.

“Our global food system is at a tipping point and Proveye is setting the standard for image-based precision agriculture. We see enormous potential for the company’s capabilities at a time where major companies are setting increasingly ambitious sustainability targets. Proveye’s technologies enable a leap forward in precision insights in a market that is ripe for innovation. This is the second heavily differentiated, growth sector Irish company we have backed along with IDPal,” said Derek Delaney, CEO, Waystone.

Founded by Mr O’Connell and Prof Nick Holden, the University College Dublin (UCD) spin-out company is headquartered at NovaUCD, and last year was awarded a €225,000 contract with the European Space Agency.