Resumo

The agriculture is a millenarian activity that promote food and fostering business. Currently, farmers focus more on making and selling of agricultural products than on producing their own food, and that inscreases the path of technological innovations. The increasing phenomenon are hardware and software companies that are changing the way produce is grown and distributed. These companies adopt technology as a key differentiating point where agriculture is the primary use case. The companies with this feature are named “agtechs”.

By 2050 the world population may reach more of 9 billion people(FAO, 2009), crop and meat consumption is growing in emerging countries (Dutia, 2014) and there is phenomenon of “industry convergence”, where sectors beyond the traditional fiber or food industries are using agricultural raw materials (Boehlje, Roucan-Kane & Broring, 2011). Agtechs alone are not able to guarantee the proper solution of world food necessities: they need another actors to support their growth. Following research question: arises which are the actors of agtech ecosystem and what are their roles?

Historically, the agribusiness innovation occurred within four technology types: biological, chemical, mechanical and managerial (Evenson, 1974), but with the scientific advances of the last decades, information and communication technologies allowed a set of new solutions for agricultural sector. Samila & Sorenson (2010) point out the importance of ecosystems for supporting innovation and entrepreneurship. Consistently with a perspective of innovation ecosystems, public funding of academic research and venture capital have a complementary effect in the creation of new firms and innovation.

The study is an exploratory and descriptive research and focuses on companies located at United States (US). The data were collected from a database (CB Insights 2017a) which provided specific information about agtech companies. This database was chosen due to being one of the few databases that has information on agtechs’ location and investment.From initial sample of 1208 companies 36 US companies that received investments were analyzed. Scientific papers, reports, and news that can collaborate with the research were also included (i. e. Dutia, 2014; Nature biotechnology, 2017)

California is the state with the highest number of agtechs within US. Investment in agtechs has grown s from forty-one investment deals in 2013 with investment of US$ 57 million to one hundred forty-seven investments occurred between January and November of 2017 with a total investment of US$ 735. Investors, business accelerators and incubators, agtech companies, corporations, agencies, universities and entrepreneurs were identified as actor of agtech ecosystem. Agtechs operate within fields such as biological pest control, farm management softwares, biotechnological solutions.

This paper contributes to the literature in two ways: The article presents the effort to compile data on the agribusiness environment with a focus on a new segment of actors that are agtechs considering the ecosystem approach. Also, interaction between actor of innovation ecosystem are revealed by the data. Similarly, the results support the Ogundari and Bolarinwa’s (2018) perspective, as the listed agtechs focus on all phases of agricultural innovations. For the future research it is suggested to conduct more detailed investigation on agtechs ecossytems with in-place data collection.

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