Investing in IoT 4.0 agriculture technology
Elevator pitch
Landify allows you to increase yields per hectare by up to 300%, significantly reduces the incidence and cost of repetitive human labor and is able to exert greater control over the environment and reduce costs,crop losses, uncertainty and the use of pesticides.
Value proposition
Thanks to the combination of the characteristics of high automation and innovativeness in the agrotechnical field, Landify allows a significant increase in yields per hectare associated with a drastic reduction in the use of both natural resources and the workforce necessary for the development and maintenance of production. In addition, while maintaining the merits of a type of outdoorcultivation, it allows greater control to protect production, counteracting the effects of adverse natural episodes and the aggression of biological entities (predators and pathogens). Finally, it allows the drastic reduction of investments related to the use of pesticides, thanks to which it is possible to obtain products less exposed to chemical agents.
Key Resources
We start from the advantage of having“in-house”all the main key figures, both in the field of strategic and technological conception and conceptualization and in the design and technical-organizational one, as well as having a consolidated team of motivated collaborators with specific skills in automation, robotics and prototype coding.
To these resources is added the added value deriving from being an active part of the European project UIA and OpenAgri,which in addition to making available the multifunctional spaces of the agrotechnical technological HUB under construction at the former Cascina Nosedoin Milan, will allow access to land (already assigned to OAM and available for prototyping) as well as to the city’s university resources, which will be available to OAM’s R&D function within the scope of the project itself.
Cost structure
In terms of cost structure, detailed in the business plan to which we refer for an analytical analysis, we are faced with three main areas of investment.
General and structural costs: the main initial setup costs have already been addressed and are part of the capital endowment, also thanks to the significant advantages deriving from being registered in the special register of innovative startups. This characterizes the initiative in a prospective posture of significant advantage in terms of taxation and access to benefits (private and public) and subsidized credit.
Development costs: if on the one hand the costs related to the availability of the land and facilities necessary to host the laboratories and offices are guaranteed by the openAgri call, on the other hand it is necessary to provide for a remuneration appropriate to the ambitions of the project towards the talents involved in the design and technical development (both software and hardware). These figures, also thanks to the great enthusiasm and involvement in the aims of the project, constitute resources that cannot be subtracted from the market without providing adequate remuneration and constitute the backbone of the company’s intangible resources in terms of knowledge and specialized skills.
Customer segments
Our prospect in terms of segmentation of the target market consists of heterogeneous clusters, if on the one hand we could be led to consider farms in the classical sense as the elective market segment of reference, in reality several factors push us to think of the company as a platform “multiple business models and multi-sided“.
Farms: offering an easily perceptible value, in a certain demonstrable sense. Make an initial investment (estimated today at around 40k euros per hectare, depreciable on a ten-year basis, which guarantees a margin to the company around 30-40%) and you guarantee over time an increase in yields (estimated in a factor of 2.5x) associated with a simultaneous reduction in operating costs, both for resources (water and fertilizers in the first place), of the number of hours of workforce necessary for production and characterized by greater certainty related to the reduction of risks loss of production due to adverse events.
Food industry, robotics and / or agrotechnical research centers, consulting: if the project were to operationally confirm the technical-functional expectations, alongside the conventional outlet market, over time, it could be possible to associate agreements with entities interested in indirect implications and potential evolutionary developments not yet expressed.
Investing in the project
The Landify project is being seeded, we are evaluating the best path to equip ourselves with the financial resources and skills necessary to complete the prototype validation process.
The minimum investment for the realization of an MVP prototype is about 250,000 euros and the execution time of about 18 months,you can consult the draft of the business plan to make a more in-depth assessment of the investment opportunity.