PARIS, France – Inarix, the AI-powered crop analysis platform, has today announced a €3.1M seed round made up of venture funds Ankaa ventures, Label Investment, Newfund, Alliance for impact and Resiliance, as well as business angel Francis Nappez, CEO of Hectar. This new funding will allow Inarix to scale its technological platform to include a new host of crops, nearly doubling their crop analysis capabilities, and further grow its team, paving the way for expansion into new markets, including the United States.
The global agriculture industry, tasked with feeding a worldwide population approaching 8 billion, has faced an increasing number of challenges in recent years, ranging from pandemic-related supply chain disruptions, Russia’s war and export blockade in heavy grain-producing nation Ukraine, and shortages of crops resulting from extreme weather events caused by climate change. These things have made it all the more important for producers to get the best out of every grain, the task that Inarix was created to address.
Launched in 2018 by Pierre Chapelle in Paris, Inarix allows users to take a picture of their crops via their smartphone and get real-time crop qualification results. Users can then use these results to make informed decisions about the value of the crops they have on their hands. By using artificial intelligence to conduct this crop analysis, Inarix empowers its users with a multicriteria measurement solution, replacing time-consuming actions from several machines with just one fast smartphone.
“Essentially, what we are doing is transforming your smartphone into a pocket laboratory,” said Inarix founder and CEO Pierre Chapelle. “The feedback that we’ve gotten from our current customers shows that being able to get these types of results instantaneously, on-the-go, and without having to use large and complex machinery has been a gamechanger for them, so we’re excited to further build out the technology to make it more widely available to all agriculture players.”
With a current customer-base including but not limited to many of the top players in the French cereal industry, Inarix currently has capabilities that can analyze and determine the quality of two main crops – barley and soft wheat – but is using this seed funding to help further develop its technology and extend its business to crops including corn, soybeans and coffee in the next 6 to 12 months. This is being done in conjunction with Inarix’s expansion into the U.S. market, where corn and soybeans are main crops.
“We believe Inarix has the potential to become the global reference in the billion dollar cereal quality control market, completely transforming the way the industry currently operates and disrupting the space,” said Alexandre Pierron-Darbonne from Label. Inarix has already achieved success in France, where they have a user base consisting of more than 400 users.
“Inarix is disrupting a sector as critical as crop and agricultural products analysis thanks to its AI-based technology,” said Ankaa Ventures’ Jonathan Cohen-Sabban. “The easy scalability of its solution allows all the players along the value chain, from farmers to end-clients, to reduce waste and guarantee the overall quality of agricultural products. We are proud to accompany the company in its ambition to improve food security and sustainability.”
On the U.S. expansion, Pierre-Jean Cobut from Newfund said, “As Inarix continues to expand the types of crops they can analyze, expanding to the U.S. market is the obvious next step in their commercialization efforts. We are looking forward to seeing their accelerated growth and supporting them in their journey.”
