CropX has acquired SCIO, a specialist in portable near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy, in the largest of the eight acquisitions the digital agronomy company has made in six years. The deal takes CropX beyond in-season decisions on irrigation and fertiliser into measuring crop quality before and after harvest, and brings in a company with around 10,000 devices deployed across many crops worldwide.

Terms were not disclosed. CropX says its acquisitions are typically paid for with a mix of shares, cash and debt. CEO Tomer Tzach told AgFunderNews that SCIO, formerly Consumer Physics, had “gone through a challenging period that ultimately led the shareholders to explore a strategic solution,” but has since stabilised and is profitable. CropX is taking on a team of 25 covering software, hardware, data science, manufacturing and sales. “This is our largest acquisition to date; it’s a sizeable company and they have the best customers in the industry,” he said.

SCIO’s devices measure moisture, protein, oil and sugar content in the field without sending samples to a laboratory. They include the handheld SCIO Mini, the SCIO Cup for grain and sensors built into combines, and are used in corn and wheat, animal feed and forage, dairy and cheese, berries and other crops; in berries they read Brix, the sugar content that drives price. Tzach said they cost about a fifth of comparable equipment and, with no moving parts, allow far more frequent testing than lab sampling.

The aim, he said, is to “close the loop” between an agronomic recommendation during the season and a measured result at harvest. He acknowledged that protein levels reflect weather and soil as much as management, and said the value will come from analysing large volumes of data. SCIO will be folded into the CropX app rather than kept as a separate platform.

CropX is approaching $20 million in annual recurring revenue from subscriptions, excluding hardware sales, and Tzach said 2027 is “a safe bet” for profitability. The company has completed an extension of its Series C with an undisclosed mix of debt and equity, raised largely to fund acquisitions. Its growth has been about half organic and half acquired, and it judges a deal by whether the cost per customer or per dollar of revenue is lower than its own customer acquisition cost.

Tzach defended CropX’s hardware-enabled model of soil sensors, telemetry, evapotranspiration sensing, weather stations and now spectrometry. Investors once saw hardware as a negative, he said, but proprietary data that is hard to replicate now looks like a moat as software becomes easier to copy. He cited the 2023 purchase of Tule Technologies, whose evapotranspiration sensor CropX integrated into its own telemetry and now sells internationally.

SCIO’s enterprise customers are spread fairly evenly across the United States, Europe and Latin America; CropX’s own base is about half US, a quarter Europe and a quarter elsewhere. Earlier acquisitions include CropMetrics and EnGeniousAg in the US, Regen in New Zealand, Dacom in the Netherlands, Green Brain in Australia and Acclym in Israel. For growers, the deal means quality readings from the field may soon sit in the same app as their soil and irrigation data.

Source: AgFunderNews