QBE North America Supports Future Farming Innovation Startups
Specialist insurer QBE North America announced a partnership with Village Capital to participate in an investment-readiness program in support of 12 early-stage food and agriculture startups that were selected to take part in Food and Agriculture: US 2018.
Village Capital builds support networks for entrepreneurs seeking to solve real-world problems, providing them with training and investments to drive growth and successful outcomes. This partnership with the QBE Foundation will leverage QBE’s expertise and knowledge, as well its philanthropic resources, to encourage a more efficient, sustainable and accessible food system. The cohort will participate in three 4-day workshops with strategic partners, investors, and sector experts – including members of the QBE Crop and Ventures teams.
Participant startups will have access to the QBE teams, including data and learnings of the QBE Ventures team and the Global Innovation Lab, allowing them the chance to hone their solutions.
The cohort is comprised of:
- Athena Intelligence: Provides data driven services for the food and agriculture market, delivering insights that improve quality, crop yield and sustainability.
- Augean Robotics: On a mission to solve the crippling labor problem faced by farmers by making robots like Wall-E a reality, beginning with Burro, a robotic following platform for work outdoors.
- Cambridge Crops Technologies: Creates natural and edible coatings for extending the shelf-life of perishable goods.
- Cerahelix: Manufactures advanced molecular filters that simplify the wastewater re-use process.
- Goodr: A sustainable surplus food management company, leveraging technology to combat hunger and reduce food waste.
- Grow Bioplastics: Developing a platform of naturally degradable and compostable plastics made from lignin, a waste product of the paper and biofuel industry, for applications in agriculture, food service packaging, and beyond.
- ProteoSense: Provides food processors with a biosensor technology that detects pathogens at the front end of the supply chain in 90 minutes or less.
- Pulp Pantry: On a mission to transform juice pulp, a neglected resource, into delicious and nutritious snacks that make it easy to eat more servings of fruits, vegetables, and fiber.
- Seal the Seasons: Brings farm-to-table products to grocers year-round by freezing and marketing local food from local farms.
- SwineTech: Provides technologies to prevent piglet deaths due to disease, starvation, and crushing.
- Vega Coffee: The first specialty coffee roasted at origin and delivered directly to customers in the U.S. within five days of roasting. Vega Coffee upends the coffee supply chain by training women farmers in Latin America to roast and package their own coffee; customers receive unique curated coffees via subscription, and Vega’s farmer roasters earn up to 4x more income than they would through the typical supply chain.
- Wexus Technologies: Wexus Technologies Inc. is an IoT (Internet of Things) software company that empowers farmers and food processors to automate tasks and reporting, reduce waste and costs, and drive energy and water efficiency with its technology platform that remotely accesses utility data and billing systems.
