The51 Ventures Fund 1 makes moves to champion women in agriculture with an investment in Halifax-based SomaDetect
Calgary, Alta, July 8, 2021—Driving women-led capital to women-led businesses, The51 Ventures Fund 1 invests as part of SomaDetect’s $6M Series A round.
Although women represent 85 per cent of all consumer purchase decisions and 1 in 3 farm operators are women, only 7 per cent of Ag-Food tech deals and 3 per cent of the record-breaking volume of dollars invested in the sector in 2018 went to women-founded teams.
The51 is constantly on the lookout for ventures at emerging intersections that have the potential to transform industries, especially when those ventures are changing the narrative around gender imbalance in their industry or field. In Canada, the Food & AgTech space is rapidly growing and showing massive innovation, and future-fit, women-led companies are at the forefront. Today, The51 is proud to announce their recent investment into SomaDetect: a precision dairy technology company with a mission to help farmers make the best possible milk.
Today, farmers do not have adequate access to information about the quality of their cows’ milk until well after the milk has been pooled and collected. Farmers are not able to identify individual cow events, such as changes in pregnancy status or disease onsets, in a consistent, timely, and inexpensive way. To correct this, SomaDetect has developed a patent-pending optical sensor technology that measures critical indicators in milk via light-scattering, computer vision and deep learning.
“The51 knows that SomaDetect is fiercely innovative and has the potential to create immense value for the dairy industry,” states The51 Co-founder and Co-CEO, Judy Fairburn. “We recognized that Bethany and her team are leaders in Food & AgTech in Canada, and we were excited to invest. SomaDetect’s technology can conceivably save the industry $100B of potential annual losses in culled cows, while providing better data for the farmers, better lives for the cattle and better milk for consumers. We’re excited to have an opportunity to bring more attention and capital to the women innovating the Food & AgTech space.”
SomaDetect’s Series A $6M (USD) raise brought capital from Ag Capital Canada, Wilbur Ellis, Merck US Animal Ventures, Builders VC, NB Investment Fund and The51, and will be used to scale pilots to 10+ North American farms in 2021, expand partnership engagements, solidify SomaDetect’s two primary verticals for next use cases, and augment the team to grow software as a service revenue.
“We’ve experienced substantial momentum over the past few months,” shares SomaDetect’s Founder and CEO, Dr. Bethany Deshpande. “The investment in our Series A raise reflects the confidence of our investors in our ability to continue to innovate and commercialize in the AgTech space.”
As the Canadian agriculture and agri-food system is a key driver of Canada's economy, generating $143 billion and accounting for 7.4 per cent of GDP in 2018, The51 looks forward to watching SomaDetect under the expert leadership of Dr. Deshpanade, transform the standards and diversity in Food & AgTech investment.