AGROSMART

Mariana Vasconcelos and Rodrigo Rodrigues founded Agrosmart in 2014 in Campinas, the agricultural technology hub in the state of São Paulo. Campinas is not just a university city — it's home to Embrapa, Brazil's national agricultural research corporation, and sits in the middle of one of the world's most productive farming regions.

Vasconcelos came from a technical background and saw the gap clearly: Brazilian farmers were sitting on some of the most productive agricultural land on the planet, but making their biggest operational decisions — when to irrigate, when to spray, when to harvest — based on intuition and manual field observation. Meanwhile, sensors that could measure soil moisture, temperature, and microclimate in real time were becoming cheap enough to deploy at scale.

The founding insight was simple: if you put cheap IoT sensors in the ground and build smart software on top of the data, you can turn intuition into data-driven decisions. Brazil's agricultural sector, which generates around 25% of the country's GDP, was the right market for that bet.

Agrosmart sells a subscription-based precision agriculture platform to farmers and agribusinesses. Customers pay a recurring fee to access the full platform, which includes IoT hardware (soil sensors, weather stations, leaf wetness sensors deployed in the fields), connectivity infrastructure to get the data back in real time, and the AI analytics layer that turns raw sensor data into actionable recommendations.

The recommendations are the product. A farmer doesn't want to look at a chart of soil moisture readings — they want to know if they should irrigate today or wait until Thursday.

Agrosmart's AI does that translation, delivering alerts and recommendations through a mobile app and dashboard.

The company also has enterprise agreements with large agribusiness companies — sugarcane mills, grain trading companies, and crop input suppliers — who use Agrosmart's platform across large portfolios of farms. These B2B deals provide stable recurring revenue and help Agrosmart reach more farmers through intermediary distribution.

The Agrosmart Platform is the core product — an end-to-end precision farming system that combines soil and climate sensors, real-time data connectivity, and AI-powered analytics. Farmers access the platform through a mobile app and web dashboard that shows field conditions in real time and delivers alerts when action is needed: irrigation triggers, disease risk warnings, frost alerts, harvest timing recommendations.

Soil and microclimate monitoring sensors are the hardware layer — deployed directly in fields to measure soil moisture at multiple depths, soil temperature, air temperature, humidity, wind speed, and leaf wetness. The combination of soil data and microclimate data allows models to predict disease pressure (fungal diseases thrive in specific temperature and humidity combinations) with far more accuracy than weather station data alone.

The AI advisory layer is what separates Agrosmart from a simple sensor company. The models are trained on years of Brazilian agricultural data across multiple crop types — soybeans, corn, sugarcane, coffee, citrus — and deliver crop-specific recommendations rather than generic data feeds.

Agrosmart's initial growth came through the HAX accelerator, one of the world's most selective hardware startup programs, which gave the company early credibility and a path to international capital. Being selected by HAX put Agrosmart in front of global deep tech investors at a time when Brazilian agtech was largely unknown outside Latin America.

The partnership with Rabobank was strategically important. Rabobank is the world's leading agricultural bank — it finances farmers across dozens of countries and has a major presence in Brazil.

By integrating with Rabobank's client base, Agrosmart got access to exactly the kind of large-scale commercial farming operations where its platform generated the most value. Farmers who are borrowing millions from Rabobank to plant a season's crop are very interested in tools that protect that investment.

Vasconcelos also became a prominent spokesperson for agtech and female entrepreneurship in Latin America, which generated media coverage and brand awareness that a traditional B2B marketing budget couldn't have bought. Being recognized as a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and speaking at international agricultural technology conferences put Agrosmart on the map for global investors and enterprise customers.

Agrosmart faces two structural challenges that will define its future. The first is the connectivity problem: Brazil's most productive agricultural land is often hours from the nearest city, with poor mobile network coverage.

Running an IoT platform in remote fields requires robust connectivity infrastructure — which Agrosmart has to solve either through LoRaWAN networks, satellite connectivity, or partnerships with telecoms who have no obvious incentive to invest in remote farm connectivity.

The second challenge is the farmer behavior change problem. Precision agriculture requires farmers to trust software over their own intuition and experience.

Many Brazilian farmers — particularly the medium-sized operations that are neither too small to afford the tech nor too large to have their own data science teams — are skeptical of technology providers who have never grown a crop. Converting skeptics takes time, references from trusted peers, and very tangible proof of ROI.

There is also competition: John Deere, Trimble, and other large agricultural equipment companies have been building their own precision farming platforms for years. The risk is that Agrosmart gets squeezed between enterprise software giants at the top and cheap sensor vendors at the bottom.

Qualcomm Ventures was a key investor, backing Agrosmart through multiple rounds including a significant investment in 2020. Qualcomm's interest made sense: its wireless chip technology is embedded in the IoT connectivity infrastructure that companies like Agrosmart depend on, and investing in the application layer gives Qualcomm early insight into how agricultural IoT was evolving.

Finistere Ventures, a specialist agtech venture fund, was also an investor. Finistere has backed dozens of agtech companies globally and brought deep sector expertise and investor network connections that pure-tech VCs couldn't match.

Rabobank — the Dutch agricultural bank that is also one of the world's largest agriculture-focused financial institutions — backed Agrosmart both as an investor and as a strategic partner. Having a bank whose entire client base consists of the farmers Agrosmart wants to sell to is an unusual and valuable combination of capital and distribution.