Swiss agtech company xFarm Technologies has acquired Sibium Analytics, a Brazilian platform that supplies geospatial, business-intelligence and ESG tools to sugarcane mills and biofuel processors. The deal opens the sugarcane and biofuel industries to xFarm's farm-management platform and extends the company's reach to 24 million hectares across more than 600,000 farms worldwide.

Sibium Analytics is xFarm's sixth acquisition in four years and its second purchase of a Brazilian company within a year. Financial terms were not disclosed. Existing investors backed the transaction, which also benefited from a new partnership with the investor BlackRock.

Brazil grows around half of the world's sugarcane and is the largest producer of sugarcane ethanol, used both as a fuel and to generate bioelectricity. Together with the United States it leads global ethanol output, and roughly 9% of Brazil's electricity comes from sugarcane-derived bioelectricity — which makes the crop's data a large prize for any farm-software company.

Sibium runs three products. Sigma Digital is a geospatial remote-sensing tool for crop mapping and risk assessment; Ambium Digital is an ESG and traceability service that produces audit-ready sustainability certifications; and a business-intelligence layer turns raw field data into operational decisions. Between them they follow sugarcane from the field through processing to biofuel certification.

xFarm CEO Matteo Vanotti said combining those tools with xFarm's supply-chain intelligence would give companies "an unprecedented, data-driven platform for farmers and processors alike". "Our vision has always been to support farmers and ag innovators with world class data-driven decision making across entire agricultural value chains," he added.

For growers the practical change is access. Sibium's existing customers now get xFarm's IoT ecosystem — hyper-local weather stations, field sensors and AI-based decision support — for operational planning, field visibility and supply-chain forecasting. xFarm's own customers, who farm many different crops, gain Sibium's tools, which the company says will speed up sustainability certification and risk monitoring across Latin America. Food companies, lenders and insurers, meanwhile, get a single auditable data provider across multi-crop supply chains.

The acquisition is the next step in xFarm's international expansion and in what Vanotti calls building "the data layer of global agriculture" — turning primary field data into value for whole industries.

Source: AgFunderNews