Farm Friend Announced the Completion of RMB50 Million Series-A Financing with Gobi Ventures as the Leading Investor

Shunwei Capital
Jul 28, 2017 · 3 min read

2017–06–07 14:45

Similar to Didi Dache and Airbnb, Farm Friend is a sharing economic platform, which joins the agricultural drone operators and farmers and serves users of both ends.

According to Iheima.com (June 7), Beijing Farm Friend Science and Technology Co., Ltd (Farm Friend) announced its completion of RMB50 million Series-A financing in April 2017. The investment was led by Gobi Ventures and followed by Yunqi Partners, GGV, Shunwei Capital and ZhenFund. The funding shall be mainly used on product R&D.

With the progressive development of internet technology, urban residents have been enjoying the various benefits of the growth of the internet. However, those rural residents whose livelihood depends on farming are still heavily constrained by their self-sufficient farm work. The very basis of launching Farm Friend was to transform the traditional farming production with science and technology, and bring the convenience of internet to the farmers.

Similar to Didi Dache and Airbnb, Farm Friend is a sharing economic platform, which joins the agricultural drone operators and farmers and serves users of both ends. Farm Friend provides service based on different demands. Sometimes the trans-region service is provided to realize fast respond and large-scale resource allocation. This shall give full play to the advantage of sharing economy and deliver professional chemicals, advanced machinery, strict agricultural drone service standards and quality security service to farmers via the use of agricultural drone operations. Thus, the status quo of plant protection can be improved by lower risk, higher precision, enhanced efficiency and increased utilization. Chemical fertilizer and pesticides usage shall be greatly cut down and the scarce labors in the rural area shall be saved.

Friend Farm has so far heavily invested labor, material and funding on regulating operation procedure and ensuring service quality. It cooperated with government authorities and relevant research institutes, to work out the industry standards of agricultural drone operations, along with the popularization of the standards on platform. It proactively researches and develops operation equipment independently to ensure the implementation of such standards.

At present, there are over 1000 agricultural drone operating groups in residence and over 5000 drones for deployment on the Farm Friend platform. Sub-offices in the provinces of Heilongjiang, Hubei, Hunan, Shandong, Jiangsu, Henan, Anhui and Jiangxi are set up. The drone service has covered cash crop belts and field crop belts in nearly 1000 towns, villages, cities and counties of over 10 provinces. Missions of over 1 million mu have been completed. It is expected that the total operation field in 2017 shall be well over 8 million mu.

“The problems for the agriculture here in China are the lagging behind technology and the insufficient labors. When you look at the food safety issue, it is kind of being brought about by the improper use of farming chemicals in the planting. Farm Friend not only helps to solve the labor issue, remarkably increase the agricultural drone operational efficiency and bring down the demand for labors, but also provides the solution to scientific crop cultivation. We believe that with the integration of land resources and the rise of new farmers, Farm Friend can well address the planting issues raised in the large scale farms and promote the modernization of agriculture.” Jiang Tao, partner of Gobi Ventures, commented.

Executive director of Yunqi Partners, Chen Yu expressed that “Yunqi Partners’ investment on Farm Friend is mainly driven by the promising prospects of the application of UAVs in the industry. We think that the agriculture would be one of the various industries where it grows the fastest. And we think highly of their team. That is why we made our investment.”

CEO of Farm Friend, Yu Yang said “The funding frequency since the establishment of Farm Friend is not only about the trust of the investors, but also the tendency that the Internet + Agriculture shall be a hot industry favored by current capital. Farm Friend shall further enhance its sharing economic model, dedicate to the construction of one-stop platform for social production of agriculture. Farm Friend shall establish its own brand and reputation in sharing economy enabled agriculture sector.”

Shunwei Capital
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