Tel Aviv-based agri-tech startup Agritask has raised USD8.5m in Series A capital from the InsuResiliance Investment Fund, an investment vehicle established for the German government by the KfW Development Bank and managed by Swiss impact investment manager BlueOrchard Finance, reports Global Investment. Barn Investimentos, a Brazilian early-stage venture capital investor, also participated in the round.

Founded in 2010, AgriTask has taken a “One Platform, One Database” approach to develop an agronomic management platform that can integrate with more than 40 hardware and software systems, including those by John Deere, IBM, and SAP.

Because of its unique system configuration, the AgriTask platform easily adapts to each client’s specific work methods eliminating any lengthy training, and therefore reducing time and cost of adoption at scale. Serving some of the largest names in agriculture such as General Mills, AgriTask’s system offers the ability to upgrade agronomic visibility and real-time decision making which helps with risk management.

Active in 20 countries, and covering more than 50 crop types, AgriTask’s platform offers a holistic solution that can aid in decision making for the entire agricultural process, from soil fertility management, growth monitoring, and harvesting logistics, resulting in higher yields and lower costs.

“We knew from day one that we need to build an extremely flexible platform that will be able to adjust itself to the clients – and not the other way around. AgriTask values and embraces the extensive knowledge of its clients – and integrates their wisdom into the platform. As a side effect, we are also creating the largest library of best practices inside our system” said Israel Fraier, founder AgriTrask.

The proceeds from this round will be used by the company to expand its farmer client base across the Americas and to increase its penetration into regional projects, where the AgriTask’s platform can provide agronomic services and risk management, and the global insurance sector, where it can enable unprecedented risk analysis. This, in turn, helps them to develop and manage more advanced insurance offerings, achieve deeper insurance penetration to new and underserved markets, and lower operational costs.

“The data-driven insights generated by our system create an opportunity to build a new generation of procession agronomy tools that we are only beginning to understand,” said Ofir Ardon, CEO AgriTask.

The company states that the huge volume of agronomic data compiled in AgriTask’s platform will lead to the development of new techniques that can optimize crop growth and agro-economic decisions, which will benefit the world’s smallholders and small-scale producers.