HONOLULU — Hawaii ag-tech startup Smart Yields today announced it has raised $420,000 in its seed fundraising round, bringing the total amount raised by the firm to $520,000.
Smart Yields helps farmers, indoor growers and gardeners protect and maximize their crops with a robust and flexible technology platform. The seed equity funding came from a mix of angel investors, accelerators, family and friends, with more than half of the capital coming from investors in Asia.
“We’re extremely humbled that we’ve been able to raise these additional funds and close out our seed round,” said Smart Yields’ CEO Vincent Kimura. “Our pace of fundraising and growing team is a testament to the broad and wide-ranging support we’re seeing for our mission.”
“We’re committed to developing innovative technologies to help growers achieve greater productivity and efficiency, supporting their communities, and ultimately helping feed the world’s growing population,” Kimura explained. “Here at home, as Hawaii bolsters its local food production, technology will play a critical part in helping our state achieve a more sustainable future.”
Smart Yields distills a potent mix of real-time monitoring, data analytics, and digital agronomy into a simple and intuitive mobile app. Designed for use in the field, Smart Yields puts the power of precision agriculture in the hands of all growers – especially small- to medium-sized independent farms. Its iconographic approach lends itself to multi-lingual farming operations, and is part of the draw for Smart Yields’ investors in Asia.
“Based on real-world feedback from a variety of farming operations in Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast, we’re continuing to refine our user experience and enhancing Smart Yields to give growers the right information and the best recommendations at the right time,” Kimura said.
Smart Yields recently was accepted into the go-to-market track of the latest cohort of the Energy Excelerator, which funds innovative startups to create a 100% clean energy future. Meanwhile this year Smart Yields is expanding its scope to support and incorporate data from avid gardeners, and working with schools to support project-based STEM education.
“School farms are excellent, hands-on learning laboratories that inspire kids to explore the environment and think about sustainability,” said Smart Yields’ Co-Founder & Head of Education Lizzy Schiller. “We’re working with educators to boost student engagement by giving them a compelling new connection to their gardens both inside and outside the classroom.”
About Smart Yields
Smart Yields is an agriculture technology platform that gives farmers, indoor growers and gardeners real-time information, trends and forecasts, and recommendations via an intuitive and customizable mobile app. While designed to be simple and easy to use, Smart Yields connects with a wide-variety of sensors and hardware and taps a diverse array of data sets and agronomy best practices to give farmers a flexible yet powerful tool to help protect crops, optimize operations, and increase yields. Founded in 2015, Smart Yields was part of the sixth cohort of the Blue Startups accelerator program and is part of the 2017 cohort of the Energy Excelerator. CEO Vincent Kimura was named Clean Tech/Ag Entrepreneur of 2016 by the Hawaii Venture Capital Association and a 2016 finalist in Pacific Business News’ Business Leadership Awards. For more information, visit smartyields.com.
