{"id":6826,"date":"2015-03-17T21:16:55","date_gmt":"2015-03-17T21:16:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itnigblog.live-website.com\/?p=6826"},"modified":"2020-06-11T13:20:58","modified_gmt":"2020-06-11T13:20:58","slug":"interviewing-emilia-vila-co-founder-ceo-at-agroptima","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itnig.net\/blog\/interviewing-emilia-vila-co-founder-ceo-at-agroptima\/","title":{"rendered":"Interviewing Emilia Vila, co-founder & CEO at Agroptima"},"content":{"rendered":"

Although technology arrived later to agriculture than to other industries, the fields are catching up. In recent years, more startups and venture capitalists have set their sights on this ancient industry, and innovation is already changing the rules of the game for farmers. Fact is that\u00a0agriculture is one of the biggest markets in the world<\/strong>\u00a0and all the agricultural process clearly have a\u00a0big margin to benefit from data science, wireless technologies and software in the cloud.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In Spain, one of the startups that is already providing solutions to manage the daily life of a farm without farmers having to step off the tractor is\u00a0Agroptima<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

To know a bit more about this startup and how the agricultural industry is being disrupted with new software tools we have interviewed\u00a0Emilia Vila, co-founder and CEO at Agroptima<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

itnig:<\/strong>\u00a0Hi Emilia! You have experience launching different startups in different industries.\u00a0Why did you decided to startup in agriculture with Agroptima?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Emilia:<\/strong>\u00a0In a previous start-up (Delizr.de) my co-founder and me talked to farmers very often. We realised how frustrated they were when it came to optimize their crops and analyze their performance.\u00a0They had poor software tools and no data<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

We also saw an increasing amount of data coming from IoT devices: drones, sensors and machines. We realised we could build the Google Analytics for farmers. And that is what Agroptima is, short and sweet\u00a0\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

We were also super motivated to have the chance to revolutionize a vast industry, which faces so many challenges in this century. For example, do you know how we will feed the world by 2050? We will have to increase food production by 70%. With Agroptima we know we can have a great impact in this world and that motivates us everyday.<\/p>\n

i:<\/strong>\u00a0In your opinion, and although the market is big enough,\u00a0why agriculture has not been attractive to entrepreneurs as fast as other industries?<\/strong><\/p>\n

E:<\/strong>\u00a0I think it is because most of the entrepreneurs come from the urban world and they focus on solving problems they encounter or products they want to use.<\/p>\n

i: You say that Agroptima\u2019s goal is \u201cto dramatically increase agriculture competitiveness through new technologies\u201d. How are you achieving this goal?<\/strong><\/p>\n

E:<\/strong>\u00a0We are achieving this goal\u00a0by focusing on the farmer.<\/strong>\u00a0We are not focusing on intermediaries or other people. We believe that farmers are the key piece to revolutionize agriculture and we are providing them with the right tools.<\/p>\n

The first version of Agroptima is already in the market and it is already helping farmers optimize their farms, save time, paper and easily comply with the law. The current version of Agroptima is a mobile app and webapp that allows farmers to keep track of their activities and manage their entire farm resources. This simple tool allows them to get rid of paper and to start gathering data that can be used to make better decisions on crop rotations, plantations or usage of specific products like herbicides, fertilizers, etc.<\/p>\n

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i:<\/strong>\u00a0You started Agroptima on February 2014 and\u00a0launched the beta of your product in September 2014.<\/strong>\u00a0What happened during that period of time?\u00a0Could you recall the main steps of the process of creating your product?<\/strong><\/p>\n

E:<\/strong>\u00a0We have built a team integrated by engineers and a group of farmers. These 6 farmers are very modern, tech friendly and have experience using farm software in the past. We listened to their needs and essentially made the best product upon them.\u00a0Co-creation is the key.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Before launching Agroptima, farmers tested it in the fields. We scaled step by step with batches of new farmers and finally now Agroptima is already available to anyone and more and more farmers are using it to optimize their farms every day.<\/p>\n

i:<\/strong>\u00a0Farming is mostly dominated by men. How do they handle the fact that the boss of Agroptima is a woman?<\/strong><\/p>\n

E:<\/strong>\u00a0You are right, actually, farming is mostly dominated by men as it is a hard physical job. However, I am lucky that our community of farmers is very professional and I have never experienced an uncomfortable situation due to gender differences.<\/p>\n

i:<\/strong>\u00a0How about your team?<\/strong>\u00a0Your co-founders are Ferran Gascon (CTO) and Anisia Tard\u00e0 (Agricultural Engineer). Did you knew each other before Agroptima or how did you came up to start a business together?<\/p>\n

E:<\/strong>\u00a0I started Delizr.de with Ferran, an online gourmet marketplace, and I have worked with him for a long time. During this experience is where we identified the opportunity of Agroptima.<\/p>\n

Meeting Anisia came later thanks to a contact we had in common. We shared a common goal: to bring tech to agriculture and to help farmers be more efficient. When you are so passionate about a common goal, the connection is very strong. In our case,\u00a0we formed the perfect team (tech, agrotech, business) and we had a great opportunity in front, so we just seized it!<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Agroptima\u2019s Team + the farmers (beta testers).<\/em><\/p>\n

i:<\/strong>\u00a0As far as I know, you haven\u2019t closed any funding round yet.\u00a0How have you financially survived until now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

E:<\/strong>\u00a0We have raised funds thanks to the 9 innovation contests that we have won all around Europe and we have chipped in personal savings.<\/p>\n

i: Are you planning to open a funding round in the near future?<\/strong><\/p>\n

E:<\/strong>\u00a0Yes, we are now actively looking for smart money to help us revolutionize agriculture faster.<\/p>\n

i: What is your long term vision for Agroptima and what are your next steps?<\/strong><\/p>\n

E:<\/strong>\u00a0Our next step is to laser focus on improving what we have and to connect with the farming community. Our long term vision, is to achieve the \u201cinterconnected farm\u201d where all the elements and devices are connected and the farmer can manage and optimize the farm from Agroptima.<\/p>\n

i: In your opinion, what is the future of agriculture?<\/strong>\u00a0Will it become a hyper-technified sector with field\u2019s evolution being supervised by drones?<\/p>\n

E:<\/strong>\u00a0For us, the future of agriculture is the involvement of the farmer in technology. Therefore\u00a0we focus on providing the best technology to the farmer<\/strong>\u00a0(not intermediaries, advisors, etc.).<\/p>\n

We are hyped everyday by new gadgets, sensors, robots, drones\u2026 Those technologies will be successful as long as farmers want to use them, as long as they are solving an important pain. If that\u2019s the case, I am sure they will help shape the future of agriculture.<\/p>\n

There is no doubt farming activities will have a higher degree of automation and therefore big data, drones and internet of things can be key to provide the inputs necessary to make this possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Although technology arrived later to agriculture than to other industries, the fields are catching up. In recent years, more startups and venture capitalists have set their sights on this ancient industry, and innovation is already changing the rules of the game for farmers. Fact is that\u00a0agriculture is one of the biggest markets in the world\u00a0and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-startups"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/itnig.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/itnig.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/itnig.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itnig.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itnig.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6826"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/itnig.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9650,"href":"https:\/\/itnig.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6826\/revisions\/9650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/itnig.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itnig.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/itnig.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}