Is Fintech the Next Step for Agtech?

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Data and technology are taking the financial world by storm, but will this fintech wave hit agriculture? Venture capitalist Mark Blackwell thinks so. He’s invested in Stockguard, which seeks to offer more efficient insurance products to poultry and livestock producers, and says the same model could work in other areas of ag.

Blackwell… “And so we have a company in the portfolio in fund one called Stockguard. That's thinking about the poultry and cattle insurance market. And they're out right now, raising a series A. And so there are market inefficiencies in Canada and the US that just think about general underwriting philosophy, how we get access to proprietary data to feed an underwriting model. And so within like animal, equipment, grain, dairy, land, retail, we're spending a lot of time really double clicking on those categories to figure out you know, what is the lending, insurance, open finance services, where there's just general inefficiencies and new business models to come to play. And so the broad category of alternative assets, but the second category of embedded FinTech and insurance is really quite interesting where we're spending time.”

Blackwell, who is a partner at Builders VC, said companies that already have a foothold into the data collection could play an important role in offering these fintech products.