Afcacia

Secha Capital and Hassium Capital have invested in FarmTrace, a cloud-based farm management tool based in Tzaneen, Limpopo and Stellenbosch, Western Cape in South Africa.

The software offers a range of tools to help farmers manage their operations by integrating all production activities into a single management platform.

FarmTrace co-founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jacques du Plessis said the firm has boot-strapped exponential growth by working intimately with its clients to solve their needs since its inception in 2015.

“We have a long back-log of interested farms, so we decided to raise capital to accelerate our growth and meet the needs of more farmers by hiring additional software developers, engineers, project managers and implementation consultants.”

FarmTrace co-founder and COO Werner Lategan added, “With this capital, FarmTrace will bring about the next wave of farming cost savings, yield and efficiency improvements. We will serve more farms, more products and more geographies and ensure that we can help farms grow sustainably and profitably.”

The investment will enable FarmTrace to grow its capacity and continue to ensure customer success.

FarmTrace becomes the backbone of farming operations and offers a highly satisfied client base across a variety of horticulture crops.

The software helps farmers modernize their operations by digitizing their manual practices into actionable data and making them more efficient, productive, and profitable.

“We’ve met with many agritech companies that treated agriculture as a homogenous sector and were not built with the farmer in mind. The FarmTrace team knows the key pain points in farming operations and developed a solution to solve them”, said Brendan Mullen, Managing Director of Secha Capital.

“FarmTrace becomes the backbone to farming operations, a vertical operating system which integrates across all data and processes on the farm. FarmTrace is uniquely positioned to grow as farmers adopt technology in their farming and business practices,” he added.

The investment and partnership will not only help farmers profitably position their operations for generations to come but will also unlock sustainable growth in the local agribusiness sector by increasing exports, increasing local employment, and reducing food waste.

Managing Director of Hassium Capital, Howard Saffy said, “We met FarmTrace three years ago when they worked with a number of local macadamia and citrus farms. The feedback from the farmers was incredible; this is a great, simple solution to help transition farms into the digital age. The system provides management with an accurate, holistic, and live view of their full farming operation to improve yields and increase efficiencies across all aspects of the farm.”

He continued: “The team has done an amazing job in building a highly satisfied client base across a variety of horticulture crops, working hand-in-hand with farmers to develop solutions to meet their exact needs. We are excited to be able to support them on the journey and look forward to being part of the growth here in South Africa and beyond.”