Description of Challenge:

The agribusiness sector activities are chiefly oriented to agriculture (farming), cattle-raising and bio-energy. However the business requires challenges especially related to investments in infrastructure (logistics, machinery and others), climate changes and crop pest attacks. The sector innovation trend moves towards transgenetics and genetic improvement in addition to the use of information technology applied to farming and cattle-raising, but the companies operating in the sector have also looked for new solutions connected to animal feeding, diagnosis, industrial raw materials, data intelligence platforms for decision-making and others.

Opportunities for Startups:

• » Technologies for increasing productivity considering the farming/forest/cattle-raising chain as a whole (e.g. logistics, industrial, commercial, food quality preservation and extension technologies);
• » Technologies for maintenance of animal health (vaccination, diagnostics, insemination, etc.);
• » Technologies in seeds and genetic modification (bio-engineering, molecular biology);
• » Agricultural pesticides and pest control systems (chemical or biological);
• » Technologies in fertilizers and fertility handling (chemical or biological);
• » Bio-energy (e.g. ethanol, biodiesel, biomass based technologies, sewage byproducts and others);
• » Precision farming, sensors, new machines and equipment, remote operation systems promoting rural mechanization, image identification systems (e.g. for assessment of pulp, lignin, volume and density of wood of trees in the field)
• » Pest detection systems;
• » Forest and agricultural technologies; efficient use of resources and productivity increase;
• » Other environmentally sustainable technologies in forest and farming;Social sustainability technologies in forest and farming;
• » Robotics, drones for spraying, planting, monitoring and others;
• » New systems based on organic agriculture and agro-ecology;
• » Technologies, products and services related to the natural ingredient supply chain.
• » Technological platforms and mobile applications for interaction with users (guidance, information access, expert consulting, etc.);
• » Systems promoting analytics intelligence and improvement of industrial or business processes;
• » Analytics Services to treat collected data;
• » Systems to promote more access to micro-credit and insurance;
• » More efficient transport Technologies;
• » Portals to aggregate information collected by sensors and other smart-farming elements;
• » Cloud services for storage of information from IoT (Internet of Things).