Monsanto Drops $930M to Acquire Weather Analytics Firm
Farming is big business, and, infused with big data analytics, has the potential to be even bigger. This reality is not lost on agriculture monolith, Monsanto, which yesterday announced it will become the next Silicon Valley mega-investor with a $930 million cash acquisition of climate modeler, The Climate Corporation.
Providing data science tools for farmers, The Climate Corporation offers a suite of risk and production management analytics tools that help growers plan and manage their fields using a data-driven approach.
The company, which was founded by ex-Googlers David Freidberg and Siraj Khaliq, ingests 3 million data points from 22 different weather data sets into Amazon’s EMR service, where the company’s data scientists then run machine learning algorithms generated through tools like Cascalog, a high-level Clojure-based machine learning language built on Cascading. The end results are high-resolution predictive weather simulations that are used to power a suite of products that The Climate Corporation offers to farmers in the $3-trillion global agriculture industry.
“The Climate Corporation is focused on unlocking new value for the farm through data science,” said Hugh Grant, chairman and chief executive officer for Monsanto. “Everyone benefits when farmers are able to produce more with fewer resources. The Climate Corporation team brings leading expertise that will continue to greatly benefit farmers and their bottom-line, and we want to expand upon this tremendous work and broaden their reach to more crops and more world areas.”
The Climate Corporation’s product set includes software aimed at helping farmers boost yields. It includes forecasts to help plan planting, tillage, spraying, and harvesting, as well as field-specific yield projections that help farmers intervene to make timely decisions to help boost yields. Additionally, they offer a stack of risk management tools that help growers obtain insurance for their operations, including federal crop insurance, hail coverage, and total weather – all done with data driven risk assessments specific to their region.
Prior to the Monsanto acquisition, The Climate Corporation, which was originally founded as “WeatherBill,” had taken in roughly $109 million in Series A through C funding, with investors including Google Ventures, Founders Fund, NEA, Khosla Ventures, Glynn Capital, Western Technology Investment, and Atomico.
Monsanto says it's identified data science as agriculture’s next major growth frontier, and an area that represents a potential opportunity of $20 billion beyond its core focus today. Between the two companies, Monsanto says it “estimate the majority of farmers have an untapped yield opportunity of up to 20 bushels to 50 bushels in their corn fields, and they believe that advancements in data science can help further unlock that additional value for the farm.”
