Indigo Agriculture Combines Technology and Sustainability for Farming
- Indigo raises an additional $200M, comprised of $175M in convertible equity and $25M in debt, bringing its total capital raised to approximately $850M.
- Since its last financing round in September 2018, Indigo has launched and expanded its key business lines–including Indigo Grain Marketplace, Indigo Carbon, and Indigo Transport–to de-commoditize agriculture.
- The new capital will support the continued global development of Indigo Grain Marketplace, an ecommerce platform for direct grain transactions, as well as Indigo Carbon, a market providing farmers with a financial incentive to enrich their soils while addressing climate change.
BOSTON–Indigo Agriculture, a company dedicated to harnessing nature to help farmers sustainably feed the planet, announces the closing of its most recent financing round. The $200M round included new investor FedEx, and new lender Pacific Western Bank as well as existing investors, bringing Indigo’s total capital raised to approximately $850M. Indigo will leverage this new financing to support its mission of enhancing grower profitability, environmental sustainability, and consumer health.
“Indigo and The Terraton Initiative offer promising solutions to address climate change,” said Frederick W. Smith, Chairman of FedEx. “The sustainability of our environment is a strategic focus area for FedEx, and we look forward to supporting Indigo’s efforts to transform agriculture into a scalable, affordable, and immediate approach to reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
“In the past year, Indigo has seen continued growth across all of its business lines, from Grain Marketplace to Carbon to Transport,” said David Perry, Indigo’s CEO. “With over 10,000 growers and nearly half of all buyer facilities in the U.S. enrolled in Grain Marketplace, we are seeing a shift towards the use of technology to create a de-commoditized market.”
The new capital will support the global growth of Indigo Grain Marketplace, an ecommerce platform that connects farmers directly with buyers of their crops. The platform has seen month-over-month transaction growth of 50%-100% during the second half of 2019. Since its public launch in September of 2018, over $300 billion worth of bids has been placed through Indigo’s Grain Marketplace. The financing will also propel the adoption of Indigo Carbon–a market providing growers financial incentives to enrich their soils–with the deployment of technological solutions that will make measuring, monitoring, and verifying soil carbon levels accurate and affordable. Indigo Carbon is part of The Terraton Initiative, a global effort to draw down one trillion tons of carbon dioxide to enrich agricultural soils. Growers have expressed more than 14M acres of interest since the program’s launch in June of 2019.
“In 2020, Indigo intends to focus its efforts on the marketplace businesses that are experiencing exponential growth, with a goal of generating positive operating cash flow near the end of the year and for the full year 2021,” concluded David Perry.
To learn more about Indigo Agriculture, click here. If you would like to support farmers in the adoption of regenerative farming practices through The Terraton Initiative, click here.
About Indigo Agriculture
Indigo improves grower profitability, environmental sustainability, and consumer health through the use of natural microbiology and digital technologies. The company’s scientific discoveries and digital platforms create new value from soil to sale, benefiting tens of thousands of growers across millions of acres. Working across the supply chain, Indigo is furthering its mission of harnessing nature to help farmers sustainably feed the planet. In 2019, Indigo established The Terraton Initiative, a global effort to draw down one trillion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide through agricultural soils. Ranked #1 on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list, Indigo is headquartered in Boston, MA, with additional offices in Memphis, TN; Research Triangle Park, NC; Sydney, Australia; Buenos Aires, Argentina; São Paulo, Brazil; and Switzerland. For more information please visit IndigoAg.com, or follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
