'The mission stays the same': French weather tech founder opens up after exit to agri giant

For some impact founders, the dream is to capture enough of the market and funding to hit unicorn status and go public as founder and owner. For others, the goal is to grow enough to show financial viability and prove the underlying product, before being bought out by a larger rival.

For Martin Ducroquet and Michaël Bruniaux, co-founders of French agri-tech firm Sencrop, their founder story is the latter. Sencrop, which offers farmers hardware- and software-based solutions for predicting weather patterns, was recently acquired by French agri-tech giant Isagri Group.

The company is now a whole subsidiary of Isagri and will take over the latter’s existing Météus weather station system.

Ducroquet, sitting in his office in Lille, seems unbothered that his ‘startup founder’ phase is closed. “Our mission is to help farmers make better decisions and reduce their crop risks,” he told Impact Loop.

The first seeds planted

Sencrop was founded in 2016 in Lille by Ducroquet, who grew up in farming in the north of France and had already worked in the food-tech and finance sectors, and Bruniaux who has more of a tech background.

They met and began collaborating at EuraTechnologies, the influential incubator in Lille which has a healthy agri-tech ecosystem around it. Sencrop’s current offices are in fact right down the road from the EuraTechnologies campus.

Around the time of their meeting, advances in telecommunications technology were such that a new generation of remote sensor technologies were becoming viable. Sencrop over subsequent years established itself as a leader for ‘connected farm’ technologies, essentially using hardware and software to help farmers more efficiently plan for each season. Their system promises to improve yields and mitigate potential crop risks, thereby reducing waste, inputs and resource use.

Sencrop over subsequent years established itself as a leader for ‘connected farm’ technologies

Clients all over the world

Opening up the Sencrop dashboard, Ducroquet showed how the app uses various models to predict future weather patterns, adjusted to the farmers’ needs. A ticker down the bottom of the dashboard showed nearly 35,000 remote sensors deployed around the world, concentrated across France and the rest of Europe.

Beginning specifically with potatoes, a crop which can be very sensitive to disease, the company expanded to all kinds of crops, including vineyards. The nature of their weather prediction system makes it easily portable to other kinds of crops and environments, and the company now has clients in South Africa and around the tropics.

Farming has always been about, ‘Okay, when should I sow at the right moment?’

Over time they added more services, like agronomic tools to advise farmers when and how much to spray pesticide, and soil-based sensors to assist with irrigation.

Ducroquet’s system, he said, is not too far removed from what agriculture has always been about. “Farmers (have been) aggregating data for centuries, forever. Farming has always been about, ‘Okay, when should I sow at the right moment?’” The only difference now, he said, is that that data is digital, and changing environmental conditions mean farmers need to be even more precise.

Establishing market dominance

The fact of the 35,000 sensors already deployed on farms around the world, which feed data into the app available to all users, was a key part of establishing Sencrop’s strong market presence.

Ducroquet likened it to sat-nav system Waze, which likewise benefits from sharing data between users, reaching a critical mass which makes it hard for new entrants to compete. It’s a ‘winner takes all’ market, he said: “the more data you have in the field, the more value you bring.”

Sencrop saw multiple successful funding rounds, with an $18m (€17.2m) Series B in 2022. Ducroquet concedes fundraising wasn’t necessarily his favourite part of the job: “It was a logical play to raise funds. But each time, it can be a stressful process for different reasons.”

Not least of those reasons is the slackening investor enthusiasm across Europe in recent years. Inflation and the war in Ukraine, among other factors, have led to what has been referred to as a funding ‘crisis’ which hit French impact startups in particular.

Not least of those reasons is the slackening investor enthusiasm across Europe in recent years

At the same time, the seasonal nature of agriculture means demand for Sencrop's solutions goes up and down with the harvests, rather than the linear growth enjoyed by startups in other sectors.

“Once you’ve missed the season, you need to wait a year for your product to go to the market again,” said Ducroquet. “If you go and see farmers in July or August, they’ll say, ‘Hey, I've just harvested, I don't need your product now.’”

The next steps

With his fundraising days behind him, and allowing for the time it will take to adjust to working under a parent company, Ducroquet says he and his team are looking forward to using Isagri’s larger network to expand further.

Some target countries he’s eyeing up are Spain, Italy, Romania and Poland. They also have plans to expand their hardware solutions, taking advantage of improved battery technologies. But the basic mission, he said, is the same.

"In the context of the agro-environmental transition, we need data to use less chemicals, to use less water, to be able to provide farmers with the technologies that will help them feed the world in a much more sustainable way."