We are excited to announce our investment in Prospera Technologies, a leader in digital farming who enables agro-businesses to turn their farms into fully digital plants, with tighter control, higher productivity, and more predictable output.
Over the last 20 years, Cisco Investments has invested in hundreds of companies across different segments. We continue to invest in new technologies because we see investments as a key part of our innovation strategy and a way to support companies with disruptive technology and business models. As part of our IoT strategy, we decided to focus in verticals that create the most strategic value to the Cisco IoT business unit. As such, digital agriculture is an emerging category where we see significant value and opportunities for Cisco.
Food and agribusiness form a $5 trillion global market that is getting disrupted by increased demand. Agriculture is transforming from minimal tech usage to adoption of sensor networks, large scale data transport and cloud/fog based analytics. This shift represents one of the largest untapped opportunities for technology innovation in networking and analytics. The declining cost of sensors and technological advances such as drones, cloud computing and LoRa make it possible to implement a digital farm architecture with measurable ROI. Through the use of precision agriculture across the technology stack, farmers can optimize returns on inputs while preserving resources and managing their cost structure. When we started our evaluation of the Precision Agriculture Tech, we were looking for companies who understand how to capture this market transition and who leverage the technologies into a robust solution to solve farmers’ pain points provide instant value to them. This is when we met Prospera.
Prospera transforms farm production with end-to-end digitalization—from agronomy to operations. Powered by advanced data analytics, computer vision, and artificial intelligence, Prospera’s system provides growers easy-to-use digital tools to achieve better yields, healthier crops, and higher profits. Prospera developed a holistic solution that spans the entire value chain from planting to harvest. The product is easy to use, highly scalable and provides value from day one. The Cisco Investments team was impressed with the company’s focus, product innovation and leadership in the space. We believe in the company’s ability to execute the strategy given their strong data science and computer vision teams and a dedicated team of agronomists.
We see Prospera as a market disruptor with significant barriers to entry for competition because of its robust technology leveraging computer vision Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to optimize yield. We are thrilled to be part of the digital transformation journey in agriculture with our partners at Prospera.