Telstra invests in on-farm connectivity

Telstra and GrainCorp – through its recently launched $30 million GrainCorp Ventures fund – have led a $12 million Series A funding round for on-farm connectivity company Zetifi.

Existing investors, including Cultiv8 Funds, GrainInnovate and Artesian, have supported the round.  

According to Zetifi, which is based in NSW regional centre Wagga Wagga, its long-range Wi-Fi coverage extension products address a major barrier to the digitisation of agriculture.

Zetifi chief executive and founder Dan Winson said: “Our experiences over the last few years confirm that agriculture and the ag services sectors are eager to adopt digital technology and automation, as long as they have a connectivity solution that supports it.”

According to Winson, the fact that Zetifi is located in an agricultural region has been a key factor in the company’s success to date.

“We approached the problem from the farmer’s perspective and the ability to be on-farm testing our ideas within a few minutes has accelerated the development of our products and technology,” he said. “It’s allowed us to rapidly iterate and refine the scalable applications of our technology that we’ll now be preparing for the mass-market.  This will involve doubling our software and product teams, scaling manufacturing to support demand in Australia and taking on the US market withing the next 12-18 months.”

Telstra’s early stage investment arm muru-D has worked with Zetifi since it went through the muru-D start-up accelerator program in 2019.

Head of innovation and managing director of muru-D, Luke Harwood, said he was thrilled to see the progress Zetifi had made since it graduated from the accelerator. He now looked forward to Telstra providing further support as the business scales up.

“There is a massive opportunity for technology to help Aussie farmers boost agricultural output and play a bigger part in Australia’s growing digital economy,” Harwood said.  

Zetifi was one of a group of agtech investments in which Telstra had invested, Harwood said. Leveraging Telstra’s network and scale for the benefit of farmers, local jobs and local communities, Zetifi’s technology was a great example of the type of solutions Telstra wanted to support, he said.

GrainCorp chief executive Robert Spurway said GrainCorp Ventures was focusing on identifying and accelerating the next generation of technologies that would keep Australian grain growers ahead of the competition, and that is what it recognised in Zetifi.

Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC) managing director Nigel Hart said connectivity remained a major issue in rural and regional Australia and investing in technologies that addressed that issue was critical for the grains industry.

“Precision agriculture is an integral part of grain farming and growers are utilising technology every day to improve on-farm production – from record keeping to making informed, data drive decisions on thins like real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning, input calculations and seed distribution,” Hart said. “Increasing innovation depends on having a reliable connection on-farm so the work that companies such as Zetifi are doing is critical for the grains industry’s future.”

The GrainInnovate Fund is a partnership between GRDC and Artesian which manages a $50 million venture fund.

Image: Based in Wagga Wagga, in regional NSW, Zetifi is able to carry out on-farm testing in minutes.