April 16, 2019

Breedr - a UK startup that seeks to take the UK livestock industry into the digital age by improving farmers' use of livestock data - had managed to raise a funding of GBP2.2 million (US$2.9 million), TechCrunch reported in March.

The company provides an app which enables farmers to gather data on livestock which could then be used to boost farm efficiency and help to have animals sold at the most optimum time and price. The data ranges from understanding which sires result in the most profitable offspring, to predicting the date of peak profit for each animal. Breedr expects farmers will benefit from a "measurable increase in profitability" through the use of the app, while also reducing the environmental impact and waste caused by overfeeding or poor breeding decisions.

Breedr was founded in early 2018 by Ian Wheal. The company's recent funding involved LocalGlobe, which led the seed round, as well as Mons Investment and several angel investors.

According to Wheal, the livestock market still works "the same way it has for centuries." "Most trading is completed with manual processes and at the last minute, with very little visibility for retailers, processors and buyers up and down the supply chain." The lack of information leads to guesswork that results in a mismatch in supply and demand, and the inability of farmers  to accurately buy, grow and sell animals on the metrics that drive the most value for their farms.

By analysing profitability of individual animals, Breedr has been able to show that the top 20% of profit is often wiped out by the bottom 20% of poor-performing animals.

Linked to the startup's data play is the Breedr marketplace, which uses the same livestock data to improve traceability and help farmers sell their livestock to meat processors and retailers. It is also where the startup will generate revenue by charging a small transaction fee and potentially upselling other financial products in the future, such as insurance or financing.

"Our data and trading platform is moving the industry from trading on how things look to the actual data that drives commercial return to the industry," adds Wheal. "[We enable] farmers to utilise data to differentiate their livestock to customer requirements rather than seed the market as a commodity. Suppliers can for the first time have visibility of supply to buy animals at specification, and retailers can plan promotions and build premium brands based on a trusted supply chain."

Meanwhile, in addition to the company's seed round, Breedr has been given a grant from Innovate UK, the UK's innovation agency, to lead a consortium developing a "Smart Contracts" system for the meat and livestock sector.

Working with farming groups, Imperial College London and Dunbia, one of Europe's largest processors of red meat, Breedr plans to use blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT) to capture the flows of data and transactions between multiple parties within the livestock industry.

-TechCrunch