It’s a digital-native-agtech-fintech-startup that operates a SaaS platform on the blockchain!
Phew… that’s a mouthful, but essentially Geora is a new way for farmers and primary producers to track and account for the many inputs in their supply chain.
And, the company has just raised $1.5 million in a seed-funding round led by Tenacious Ventures.
Geora’s platform captures information from both the farm and along its onward delivery routes, and it aggregates it all in one place. This allows for more accurate accounting, but it also helps finance companies to understand the status of the business, and offer targeted trade finance.
When we start talking about the database itself, it gets a bit more complicated. The various inputs are stored as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum network. This offers an immutable record of each item, making tampering with the details very difficult, boosting transparency and reliability.
This use-case has long been touted as being ideal for the blockchain, but few have been able to effectively marry the high-tech complexity of crypto-tokens with the practicalities of getting goods to market.
Geora offers a low-code and no-code approach, and a simple subscription model. It claims to have learned from the challenges, and offers a simple product to the farmer that links to the systems used by financiers.
“Our investors understand the enormous opportunity to service Australia’s agribusiness industry, and the need to innovate in how we invest in agriculture so that we can support farmers in making food and fibre production more sustainable, efficient and secure” says Bridie Ohlsson.
Other venture firms in the round included NAB Ventures and Flying Fox Ventures.