Utrecht, 6 April 2021
Moovement successfully closed a EUR 1.1 million investment from Future Food Fund, which invests in agricultural and food technologies. The investment proceeds will be used to enhance the current customer platform and to accelerate customer growth. “In addition to the animal location insights that we currently offer, over the coming months we will expand our customer platform with new insights into animal behaviour.”, says Luuk Heuskes, co- founder of Moovement.
Moovement started the commercial offering of its product in September 2020. It currently services a substantial number of beef producers in Australia. “We will use the funds to accelerate growth in Australia and to expand in the US, Africa and South America, following customer demand”, says Moovement co-founder Pieter Vogels. In addition to beef cattle, Moovement is actively involved in native wildlife preservation and sheep projects internationally.
Globally there are over 400 million head of cattle, concentrated primarily in remote rural regions of Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, and North and South America on extensive pastoral properties. Farmers often have limited access to their herd due to long distances between them, and their cattle and inaccessible terrain. Farmers therefore lack insight in the state of their herd, which hinders optimal decision making.
Moovement offers beef producers in those rural area’s actionable insights and alerts about the state of their herd, in order to manage their cattle in a more efficient and sustainable manner.
The Moovement product is a plug-and-play solution, consisting of GPS ear tags, a local LoRa radio network and a mobile app. It was developed over 3 years of extensive field testing in partnership with over 20 pilot farms in Australia. “As a dedicated Agtech investor, we have reviewed many sensor- based solutions, but very few of them manage to satisfy the specific needs of customers” says Jeroen Kimmels of Future Food Fund. “The ear tag itself is unique because it is solar charged -hence no batteries to replace-, light weight, easy to install and straightforward to use, and all this at an affordable price."
Moovement was founded within a start-up acceleration program at Rabobank in 2017. In April 2020 the founders, Pieter Vogels and Luuk Heuskes, spun Moovement out as a new and separate entity, funded by themselves and a small group of informal investors. Moovement is based in Utrecht, The Netherlands and Brisbane, Australia with a team of 10 persons.
Future Food Fund is a € 12m seed capital fund, founded and funded by 30 entrepreneurs. With backgrounds primarily in food & agriculture and technology, these entrepreneurs wish to actively contribute to the success of the fund, not only with money, but also with experience and network. Future Food Fund is aimed at Dutch companies that want to impact the food & agricultural sector with innovative technology and/or disruptive business models.
