Sharing thoughts from one of several innovation corners. In this one I'm talking about Startups, AgTech (agribusiness), big investors (Venture Capital) and sharing a bit of Brazilian market in such context. Do you think startup business market deserve attention?

1. Gerd Altmann (Freiburg/Deutschland) - Pixabay.com
Does the Startup Business Market
Deserve Attention?
Although the title of this article is a healthy tease, the concept of it, is to share a bit of
what is happening in Brazil and around the world, in the scenario of investments made
by major groups in startups. The matter is broad, but it is worth commenting a while on
that market. By definition (paraphrasing what is on Wikipedia) a startup is
“An emerging newly established company and still in the developing
phase, which is usually the technological base. The main objective is to
develop or improve a business model, ideally scalable and repeatable”.
Good examples are iFood, UBER, Netflix, NuBank.
Curiosity: The impact of Digital Transformation - a phenomenon that incorporates the
use of digital technology to traditional problem-solving - occurred in recent years in the
world in virtually all sectors of industry. It has catalyzed a "specialization" in the world
of the Startups. Americanized terms like AgTechs (agribusiness), HealthTechs (health),
FinTechs (banks and financial market), LegalTechs (legal), InsurTechs (insurance) are
some examples to reference the niche in which a startup operates.
Almost ubiquitous in the world of startups the big investment funds like Tiger Global
Management, SoftBank and Y Combinator, called VC (Venture Capital), here read
venture capital, they are large groups of investors that bid high, and cooperate, for the
success of some startups that already have considerable maturity in their business.
One of the direct results of these investments added to the experience framework shared
by these funds, was the rise of it, as the market refers to Unicorns. This term coined by
the American Aileen Lee (Welcome to the Unicorn Club: Learning from Billion-Dollar
Startups) in 2013 to classify startups with a "valuation equal to or greater than US$ 1
billion. Yes, the above groups also invested in Brazilian startups like NuBank (a
FinTech "decacorn" worth US$10 billion), Stone, Arco Education, 99 Taxi, and several
others.

2. Draws attention to the dichotomy: If on the one hand the participation of agribusiness
in the GDP result Brazilian in 2019 was 21%, i.e., a fraction of almost a quarter was
agriculture - we are talking about the GDP with a published value of R$ 7.3 trillion.
For instance, approximately R$ 1.8 trillion were generated entirely by the national
agribusiness segment, and, not surprisingly, there is not any Brazilian AgTech taking
part in the "Unicorns Club". There is a lot of food for thought.
And in the world? Curiously, until the year 2017, there was no startup in the AgTechs
being part of the "Unicorns Club". Indigo was the first one (US$ 3.4 billion valuation).
Later on others group of company came in, such as Gingko Bioworks, Cool Planet
Energy Systems, Farmers Edge Laboratories, Precision Hawk, Farmers Business
Network, Zymergen (remarkably close to becoming Unicorn). Another point that draws
attention is the amount of AgTechs that have reached the status of Unicorn and that
they are agglomerated in the Biotechnology segment - such agglomeration was
"noticed" in the THRIVE report - 2020 THRIVE TOP 50 AGTECH. Well, in such a
report two national AgTechs were mentioned: AgroSmart and Solinftec.
What about the dairy value chain? It is quite true up to this point, no startup is
connected, directly, to the milk chain that has joined the select "Unicorns Club." I see
this as a great opportunity. Intentionally, the present text has not addressed the
different types of investments that there is in the market today (Bootstrapping, Angel
Investor, Seed, Series, etc) - these are designed for different levels of commercial
readiness that each startup owns.
In conclusion, whether you belong to an agribusiness startup, the question is, what kind
of attributes attract investors' attention and justify the amount invested? The answer is
that there is no "math formula" for this. Instead, filters used to analyze some aspects
such as the historical and the founders’ profile (mainly the execution capacity), the
quality of the problem that the startup is willing to solve (more complex problems
require a bolder degree in the profile of the founders), the size of the market to be
worked on (international expansion as well as partnership building are very welcome),
levels of product disruption or service (a point that has been drawing investors'
attention lately). Lastly, the ability to expand the business - replicability - to other
industries.
Maybe you could become the next founder of a startup! ;-)
Thank you
Edson Barbosa
Digital Agriculture | Innovation | Digital Farming | Solution Architect
#foresight #intuition #creativity #curiosity #passion #humor #purpose #enthusiasm
#serendipity #reliability #inspiration #kindness #persuasion #criticalthinking #futurists
#wit #agribusiness #agriculture #agtech #foodtechnology #digitaltransformation
#technology #innovation #nanotechnology #biotechnology #transhumanism