The Swiss Confederation funds AgFlow’s project to empower Agricultural producers with timely and fact-based market intelligence
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We are proud to announce that the Swiss Innovation Agency InnoSuisse has approved our grant application and will fund a large portion of a seven figures development project.
“I will never forget the day when my grandfather told me, as I was a child in Tunisia, that he had sold the family’s olive groves to a large exporter. Turns out he had sold them at a ridiculous discount because he didn’t know how much the lands were truly worth then. How come? The buyer had better information about the groves’ production potential and he was aware of a new market regulation positively affecting export prices. He knew better and took advantage of it. That’s the day I learned that access to market information is not fair and therefore it is power.” Nabil Mseddi, CEO AgFlow.
The output of ~600m farms globally is traded just by 12’000 trading houses. This means that, on average, a trader captures 50,000 times more value than a farmer because agricultural markets are fundamentally broken. We aim to rebalance access to information, and therefore redistribute power to those with limited access to market intelligence.
With the participation of the Universities of applied sciences of Geneva and Luzern, we aim to establish symmetry in value distribution across the value chain segments by empowering agricultural producers with access to frequent and complete agricultural market knowledge synthesis through a user-friendly mobile application.
Currently, agricultural producers and farmers have access mainly to conventional and poor information sources such as old-school magazines, non-specialized TV and radio news, etc. to inform themselves about global markets. As a result, they often ignore how much what they are selling is truly worth because they rely on outdated and synthetic data, which leads them to take the price offered by buyers who benefit from an unfair competitive advantage as their network provides them with privileged market data. In practice, this means that a seller and a buyer, regardless of their location, may trade the same goods, at the same time, with the same quantity, but with profit margins differing enormously.
Once implemented, this project will equip producers and farmers with up-to-date, fact-based and high-quality market knowledge to quickly understand key market events and other signals in full transparency.
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Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (iHomeLab)
The iHomeLab of the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) is the Swiss research laboratory for building intelligence. With around 25 researchers, mainly from the fields of computer science, electrical engineering, and natural sciences, as well as over 200 business partners, we conduct application-oriented research in the fields of energy efficiency, safe building intelligence, and assistance systems. One of the core competencies are Machine Learning Technologies, especially Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Conversational AI, and NLP. The iHomeLab is also a member of SwissNLP.org, the Swiss Association for Natural Language Processing.
HEPIA (inIT)
HES-SO is the largest university of applied sciences (UAS) in Switzerland and the second largest higher education institution of the country, with more than 21’000 students and 25 schools located in 7 cantons. HES-SO offers a large variety of education programs: 46 Bachelor degrees, 22 Master degrees, and 255 continuing education courses. It employs 10’000 collaborators, with approx. 700 FTE dedicated to R&D activities. Strongly anchored in the regional economy, HES-SO collaborates closely with SMEs, its R&D extends to several aspects of industrial-scale production. HES-SO undertakes research projects with a wide range of partners in Switzerland and abroad.
HEPIA is one of the six schools of the Geneva-based campus of HES-SO. HEPIA comprises nine bachelor’s degree programs and four research institutes. Research activities at HEPIA particularly target the domains of urbanization and sustainable development. One of the research institutes of HEPIA is the Information Technology and Telecommunications Institute (inIT). inIT brings together skills in “Data sciences & computational intelligence”, “Communicating, Reconfigurable, Embedded Systems”, and “Networking, trust, privacy, and security”.
AgFlow
AgFlow is an Agricultural market data one-stop-shop providing actionable insights exclusively based on factual physical market data from a transparent and exclusive network. We are the world’s first and only live agricultural cargo tracking solution coupled with the market’s largest physical cash prices database. Our data is accessible via a web-based platform and API access. Commodities buyers, sellers, risk managers, investors, and movers use our data to enhance their demand forecasting, seize more and better business opportunities, and focus more on value-adding activities.
For more information, visit www.agflow.com.
Investor Relations: sacha.prost@agflow.com
Media Inquiries: media@agflow.com
